586 THE OCEAN WORLD. 
material? That such is the true philosophy of salmon river life is 
borne out by the following facts :— 
1st. So soon as the secretions of the milt and roe become 
exhausted, the spent fish turn seaward-to recruit. 
and. 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 wé 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 £12,000 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, Dundurcus, 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 47,500 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. 
