84 FISHING GOSSIP. 
them and see for myself. The lessees of the Shin 
and Thurso fisheries in Scotland will tell you that 
the clean-run December and January fish are barren 
and never will spawn, but they will admit that the 
same description of fish which ascend in February 
‘will spawn the following October. 
The following is an extract from the Angler-Na- 
turalist, which illustrates the influence of the source 
of a river upon the earliness or lateness of its fish :-— 
“This” (the early ascent of salmon) “jis often the 
case in rivers issuing from large lakes, in which the water 
has previously undergone a sort of filtering process, and 
has become warmer, owing to the greater mass and higher 
temperature of its source ; whilst, on the other hand, streams 
which are liable to be swollen by the melting of snows, 
or cold-rains, or which are otherwise bleak and exposed, 
are later in season, and yield their principal supply where 
the great lake rivers are beginning to fail. Two .of 
the Sutherland streams offer good examples of these oper- 
ating causes. One, the Oikel, springs from a small exposed 
alpine pool some half mile in breadth ; the other, the Shin 
(a branch of the Oikel), takes its rise in the deep sweeping 
waters of Loch Shin and its tributary lakes. The Shin joins 
the Oikel about five miles from the sea. Early in the spring, 
all the salmon éntering this common mouth diverge at the 
junction, pass up the Shin, and thus return, it would appear, 
to their own warmer stream ; whilst very few keep the main 
course of the Oikel until a much later period.” 
I now propose to explain the circumstances under 
which January fishing, in particular, has been sanc- 
