SUMMING UP THE QUESTION. 39 



at times, it would then be an agreeable substitute. 

 Formerly, it was so common an article of diet in Scot- 

 land, that farm-servants and others, on engaging with 

 new employers, would make it a condition that it should 

 appear on their tables only a certain number of times a 

 week. Otherwise, they would have breakfasted on 

 salmon, dined on salmon, and supped on salmon, every 

 day ! No immediate fear need be entertained of any 

 very early return of such unlimited salmon-consumption. 

 What would become of the salmon, it has been asked, 

 if they were abandoned to the cruel mercies of the 

 poacher 1 The answer is easily given. To judge from the 

 experience of the past, in ten years not a Salmo salar 

 would be found in our streams ! It is certain that at one 

 time the salmon-fisheries of Great Britain were nearly 

 annihilated through greed and want of management and 

 indiscriminate fishing. It is equally certain that the 

 prudent legislation of recent years has done much to 

 recuperate them, and that a steady persistence in the 

 present course cannot but be productive of the best re- 

 sults. " The philosophy of the whole question," says an 

 enthusiastic writer, " lies in a nutshell. If the man who 

 causes two blades of grass to grow where only one grew 

 before is a benefactor to his race and his country, the 

 same may be emphatically said of him who rears two 

 salmon to-day for the one he reared twenty years ago." 



There is no end to the destructive appliances which 

 man has brought to bear against this lordly fish ; and it 

 is a matter for wonder that any who once ascend our 

 rivers should find their way back into the sea. Nor 

 would they do so, but for the admirable institution of 



