92 THE SALMON. 



of salmon, where the burgomasters, as in many other 

 parts of Scotland, are compelled to reinforce an ancient 

 Statute, that commands all masters and others not to 

 force or compel any servant, or an apprentice, to feed 

 upon salmon more than thrice a week. . . . The abund- 

 ance of salmon hereabouts in these parts is hardly to be 

 credited. And the reader, I fancy, will be of my per- 

 swasion, when he comes to consider that the price of a 

 salmon formerly exceeded not the value of sixpence 

 sterling." And a hundred years later, the English 

 Engineer Officer, Captain Burt, writing from Inverness, 

 says, that the price of salmon there was a penny a pound, 

 and that " the meanest servants who are not at board 

 wages will not make a meal upon salmon if they can 

 get anything else to eat." In partial corroboration of 

 these statements about the Ness, it may be mentioned 

 that there is a person still living who held a lease of 

 a fishing in that river, under which he was bound to 

 supply the inhabitants of Inverness, during a considerable 

 portion of the year, with salmon at 2d. a pound. 



Indeed, till the present century almost every traveller 

 that entered Scotland made the " great plenty of salmon" 

 a subject of remark. Thus Defoe, as soon as he enters 

 the kingdom at Kirkcudbright, woites down : " There i^ 

 a fine salmon-fishing in this river ;" and when he reaches 

 Aberdeen, he says : " The rivers Dee and Don afford 

 salmon in the greatest plenty that can be imagined, to 

 that degree that in some of the summer months the ser- 

 vants won't eat them but twice a week, they are so fat 

 and fulsome ; it's almost incredible how they spread ; in 

 autumn they engender, and in shallow pools of the river 



