586 THE OCEAN WORLD. 



material? That such is the true philosophy of salmon river life is 

 borne out by the following facts : — 



I St. So soon as the secretions of the milt and roe become 

 exhausted, the spent fish turn seaward to recruit. 



2nd. The digestive secretions are not eliminated in the absence 

 of food ; the most recent experience of physiology finds its echo here. 

 Your boxer trains on meat or nitrogenous aliment, but enters the list 

 on hydro-carbons (fat, saccharines, and amylaceous substances). The 

 salmon get into condition by immediately appropriating plenty of 

 marine animals, enter their life-struggle of wintry months in river 

 waters with an incorporated stock of potential calorific aliment, con- 

 vertible, as occasion demands, into organic muscular mechanical effort. 



The British rivers in which the salmon abound are, as we have 

 seen, the Severn, the Wye, the Tweed, the Tay, the Don, and the 

 Dee, with many of their tributaries ; and in Ireland, the Shannon, the 

 Suir, the Boyne, and many others. Besides these, many of the 

 watercourses of lesser note adjoining the coast have been renowned 

 for their salmon fisheries. Some of the Scottish rivers, especially, are 

 famous for the size and quality as well as numbers of salmon. In 

 days not very distant from ours, farm servants made it a condition of 

 their hiring that salmon should not be served to them more than 

 three days in the week. Those times are changed. In the districts 

 in which this condition was the most stringently insisted on, the 

 proprietors derive a princely revenue from this source alone. The 

 Tay fisheries yield a revenue of ^17,000 per annum. The Spey, 

 for its length the richest in Scotland, produces ;^i 2,000 per annum. 

 The river is only 120 miles from its source to the sea, and its 

 picturesque banks are celebrated in a local ballad, which says, not 

 very harmoniously, that 



"Dipple, Dundnrcus, Dandaleith, and Dulocq, 

 . Are the bonniest haughs of the run of the Spey ;" 



but there's " no standing water in the Spey." The river drains 

 1,300 miles of mountains, many of whose bases are more than 

 1,000 feet above the level of the sea. The Tweed, which has been 

 "poached'' and plundered, by its proprietors using unfair implements, 

 until there was scarcely a fish in its upper waters, is slowly recovering 

 under legislative enactments, and its rental is now ;j^7,5oo per annum. 

 Salmon abound in the Loire and its affluents, but are not so 

 plentiful in the Seine and Marne. They enter the Rhine and the 

 Elbe, and most of the great rivers of the north of Europe. In France 

 they were formerly found in the rivers of Brittany, and in the Gironde. 



