x A BOOK ON ANGLING 



Britain afford no supplies adequate for the sustenance of a 

 lusty fresh-run salmon even they are slow to acquit kelt 

 salmon of preying upon trout and even upon young of their 

 own kind. A kelt's appearance condemns him ; he looks so 

 hungry that one thinks he must be after prey. Perhaps in the 

 interest of science you kill a kelt which you have landed, cut 

 it open and show your gillie that the stomach is empty. He 

 may say it has often been said that the fish when hooked 

 has the power of ejecting the contents of its stomach. Wait a 

 minute. If this fish has been taking food within the preceding 

 four-and-twenty hours, there will be remains of it in the 

 intestine. The intestine is void also. If your skill in dissection 

 serves you, it may be possible to convince your gillie, not only 

 that the intestine is empty, but that it is actually closed, so 

 that for an indefinite period previous to the capture of that 

 kelt no food can have passed that way. 



This, however, is no fitting place for airing at length the 

 views I entertain on the problem ; but whereas it is a perennial 

 subject of argument among anglers, I venture to suggest two 

 considerations to be taken into account by those who feel an 

 interest in the matter. First, let them study the report by the 

 German ichthyologist, Dr. Mieschen Russ, on the post-mortem 

 examination of several hundreds of Rhine salmon clean-run 

 and kelts. He examined minutely the digestive tract of these 

 fish ; he found the stomachs of all of them to be empty, but 

 in two instances he detected traces in the intestine of the 

 scales of some small cyprinoid fish. Second, that if it be 

 admitted, as surely it must, that the supply of food in a 

 Highland river is wholly inadequate for the support even 

 of the very limited number of salmon which, in these days of 

 drastic netting, find their way into it, what must have been 

 the case in primitive times when salmon were free to enter our 

 rivers in dense shoals such as swarm up the rivers of the 

 Pacific coast of North America ? although even there the stock 

 is being steadily depleted by the machinery used at canning 

 stations. 



I should have expected Francis, who knew the Thurso, to 

 have described a method of fly-fishing for salmon that I learnt 

 many years ago on that river, which contains long reaches of 

 sluggish water. To practise it, instead of beginning to cast at 

 the head of a pool and working down, the angler begins at the 

 tail of the pool, casting across and working the fly round in 

 the usual way with as long a line as he can rightly command. 



