130 THE SALMON. 



abandoned. The fixed-net fislieries on the firths of Moray 

 and Beauly, which more than half exhausted the rivers 

 there emptying themselves, are now, some of them, given 

 up as unprofitable, and others dwindled to a trifle, partly 

 from having been " fished out" by new fixtures farther 

 seaward, partly from the general decline in the number 

 of fish, caused by over-fishing. 



The same story has to be told of the efiect of stake and 

 bag nets in England and Ireland, though in both these 

 countries those engines are of more recent introduction 

 than even in Scotland. In Ireland the eff"ects were so 

 rapid and visible as to produce both popular tumults 

 and ultimately something that comes pretty near to 

 legislative prohibition. The reports of the English In- 

 spectors of Salmon-Fisheries are fuU of statements of the 

 mischief wrought by these devices ; for instance, in their 

 Second Eeport (1863), they say of a fishery on the Esk 

 in Cumberland : — " Before stake-nets were introduced it 

 was let for £300, but with their increase its value dimin- 

 ished ; in 1840 it let for £100, and its rent varied from 

 that sum to £70, and last year it was let at £50 only." 

 Still stronger instances of the same kind might have 

 been adduced from the same district. The Solway, on 

 its Scotch shore, is (as we shall have occasion to mention 

 more fuUy hereafter) the birthplace of that kind of stake- 

 net that was afterwards found capable of being made 

 to stand and work upon the open sea-shore ; and the 

 Solway also afibrds the most conclusive evidence, not 

 only of the unfair, but of the ultimately self-destructive 

 operations of these engines. The first stake-net on the 

 Solway — i.e., the first fixed net with leaders and cham- 



