FISHES 



Our county depends for its fishes on the Thames which bounds it 

 from the City Stone at Staines up to Remenham just below Henley, on 

 the famous regatta course, and on several tributaries, or rather portions 

 of them. These are the Colne, which divides Buckinghamshire from 

 Hertfordshire for a short distance ; and the Thame, which for a portion 

 of its sinuous course divides our county from Oxfordshire. The Ouse, 

 generally connected with Bedfordshire, flows across the northern side of 

 Buckinghamshire. If we except char ; that curious member of the cod 

 family, the burbot or eel pout ; the migratory salmonidas and one or two 

 species only found in lakes, Buckinghamshire can provide specimens of 

 practically all the freshwater forms found in Great Britain. Time was of 

 course when salmon and sea trout came up our premier river. At the 

 commencement of the last century the Thames was a salmon river, and 

 if the experiments which are being made by the Thames Salmon Associa- 

 tion, led by Mr. W. H. Grenfell, M.P., prove a success and those 

 directing its affairs seem assured that salmon can be made to ascend the 

 river restocking will doubtless be carried out on a large scale, and the 

 fish permanently reintroduced. When we find smelts, a fairly delicate 

 fish, making their way up from the sea through the foul water of the 

 estuary as far as Teddington, it may fairly be surmised that salmon could 

 make the same journey. In all probability the obstructions in the river 

 and pollution have a good deal to do with their absence, while the 

 heavy netting which used to take place probably succeeded in ultimately 

 exterminating the few fish which, pollution notwithstanding, endeavoured 

 to fight their way up to the spawning beds. The opinion has been 

 expressed that to turn the Thames into a salmon river is merely a matter 

 of money, but it is nearly certain that, in consequence of the unsatis- 

 factory spawning beds and the pollution of the water in winter from 

 well manured agricultural land, salmon, which breed best in a wild 

 country, will never become numerous in the river, unless salmon 

 culture is carried out on an enormous scale, as is done by the United 

 States Fish Commission in the case of those rivers where the fish are 

 caught and tinned for the English and other markets. 



It is an unfortunate fact that the tendency in a highly civilized and 

 thickly populated country is to destroy rivers so far as their suitability 

 for fish is concerned. That notable little river at High Wycombe, for 

 instance, is more or less ruined as a trout stream by occasional pollutions 

 from paper mills. It is a water which in the by no means remote past 



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