226 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



as a " shedder" or " baggit," and the male as a "kipper," but 

 speaking generally they are termed " kelts." Such fishes, as 

 might be expected, are positively unwholesome. 



Let us follow our Salmon stage by stage up the Severn, past 

 the city of Gloucester, where laws against polluting the river are 

 not in force, to the weirs at Tewkesbury and elsewhere, which 

 the fish can only cross at high floods. Here the poachers prey 

 upon them at every obstruction ; and disease, due to contagion, 

 conjoined with filtb, carries off numbers. But irrespective of the 

 physical difficulties they must experience in surmounting natural 

 or constructed obstacles (as weirs), the Salmon has many other 

 dangers to contend with. First, and foremost, are those of 

 pollutions of the river-water. Drains, manufactories, and water 

 mines, are wholesale causes of destruction, more especially to 

 young fish. During the last few seasons I have collected some 

 of the accounts recorded respecting poisoning fish. A poacher 

 having placed some chloride of lime in an old stocking, sunk it 

 in a sluggish stream, and killed many Trout He was convicted and 

 punished, I suppose, as a retail sinner, for it was lately recorded 

 in ' The Field' that the proprietors of a large paper-mill, on the 

 Cray River, have obtained a special Act of Parliament to permit 

 them to discharge the same poisonous substance into that river, 

 where they would be wholesale destroyers. The washings of bags 

 which have contained artificial root manure, or bones dissolved 

 in sulphuric acid, have been known to kill all the fish in a pond ; 

 the self-same substance, to the extent of two or three cwt. to an 

 acre, is often employed in fields contiguous to rivers, into which 

 much of it would obtain access were a sudden storm to occur 

 immediately subsequent to its employment. The washing of 

 sheep, from the drugs employed, has also been observed to poison 

 the water. 



An old gas-tank was drained into a sewer, and from thence 

 obtained access to the River Roden, poisoning the fish for 

 miles. Peat-water, or the bursting of peat-bogs into rivers, has 

 produced similar results. Not only does the presence of pollutions 

 in rivers concern the owners of fisheries, the fishermen who have 

 to earn their living, as well as the consumers of fish, but it also 

 raises the very interesting home-question of how such pollutions 

 operate upon the dwellers residing on its banks ? Does not the 

 stream thus rendered unfit for domestic purposes drive the public 



