BEFORE THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 147 



cellar in Trent ; seen 50 in a night killed ; always 

 found a ready market ; seen upwards of a hundred 

 killed in a night, most of them full of roe, kip- 

 pered with saltpetre to make them red ; the people 

 spear by torch-light ; Mr. Bell buys the fish all the 

 year round, even during close time ; he has sold 

 foul fish taken on the spawning beds to Bell ; 

 fishery up the Tweed ruined by fishing in close 

 time ; they poach all the winter ; poachers go in 

 bands or gangs ; one water-bailiff cannot prevent 

 them ; his brother killed upwards of 400 fish at one 

 hauling-place in one night in close time j it was a 



NOTES. 



the grampusses, or porpoises and seals ?" as if they took 

 the two fish to be one sort ; and the witness Mr. Sheppard 

 says he has seen a grampus from six to ten feet ; why a 

 grampus is commonly twenty feet long, and the ordinary 

 length of a porpoise is from eight to ten feet. I very much 

 doubt that there is any such fish about the salmon fisheries 

 as a grampus, but that they are all porpoises ; they are too 

 unweildy a mass to enter far into shallow rivers generally. 

 Mr. Halliday, at page 74, says, " he has seen the porpoises 

 catching the salmon till they were quite glutted with them, 

 and then they would play with them by throwing them into 

 the air, and catching them again before they reached the 

 water, as a child would amuse itself with a ball." I believe 

 Mr. Halliday quite mistakes this matter. It is very true the 

 porpoise throws his prey up into the air and catches it 

 again, yet this does not proceed from satiety or wantonness, 

 but from necessity ; he cannot, from the position of his 

 mouth, take his prey under water, but forces it to the sur- 

 face, when it springs out of the water and he takes it on its 



