Common Atlantic Salmon 



were, also common in France, Belgium, Holland, and Prussia, as- 

 cending the Rhine as far as Basle. The southern limit of their 

 distribution in Europe is Galicia, the northwestern province of 

 Spain, in latitude 43. "There is a river in Macedon," says 

 Fluellen, in "King Henry the Fifth," "and there is also moreover 

 a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye, at Monmouth; but it is 

 out of my brains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis 

 all one, 'tis so like as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is 

 salmons in both." But Fluellen was wrong, for there are no 

 salmon in any part of the Mediterranean water system. 



On the American side of the Atlantic, the presence of salmon 

 in Hudson Bay and on the Arctic coast is not certain. They range 

 far north on the Labrador coast, and in the waters of the Great 

 Lakes system they ascended as far as Niagara Falls. Nova Scotia, 

 New Brunswick, and Maine have many salmon rivers. New 

 Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, a very few good ones. 



The salmon was at one time very abundant in the Connec- 

 ticut, and it probably occurred in the Housatonic and Hudson. 

 They have also been taken in the Delaware which probably 

 marks the southern limit of their distribution on our Atlantic 

 Coast. 



Salmon were marvellously abundant in Colonial days. It is 

 stated that the epicurean apprentices of Connecticut would eat 

 salmon no oftener than twice a week. "Plenty of them in this 

 country," wrote Fuller, "though not in such abundance as in 

 Scotland where servants (they say) indent with their masters not 

 to be fed therewith above twice a week." There can be no 

 doubt that one hundred years ago salmon fishing was an im- 

 portant food resource in southern New England. Many Connec- 

 ticut people remember hearing their grandfathers say that when 

 they went to the river to buy shad the fishermen used to sti- 

 pulate that they should also buy a specified number of salmon. 

 But at the beginning of this century they began rapidly to dimin- 

 ish. Mitchill stated, in 1814, that in former days the supply to 

 the New York market usually came from the Connecticut, but of 

 late years from the Kennebec, covered with ice. Rev. David 

 Dudley Field, writing in 1819, states that salmon had scarcely 

 been seen in the Connecticut for 15 or 20 years. The circum- 

 stances of their extermination in the Connecticut are well known, 



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