SALMON LEGISLATION. 139 



departments, the spiritual and moral, we have nothing 

 to do, still less to object to,—- the foe and the stranger, 

 the heretic and the scoffer, may indeed imagine that they 

 spy defects ; but it is perhaps enough that we Scotch 

 ourselves claim a great success, and that indeed our 

 satisfaction is so complete that it can neither be aug- 

 mented by the assent nor shaken by the sneers of our 

 neighbours. As to the other department, the piscatory, 

 one result of that careful and repeated law-making in 

 the old times has been that through centuries a fish has, 

 to some extent, been preserved that would otherwise 

 have been extinguished, and that now we have increased 

 encouragement for the introduction of such means to 

 the same ends as have been rendered necessary by the 

 alterations and extension of the arts of capture, by the 

 lessons of experience, and by the discoveries in natural 

 history — especially for the application of the old remedies 

 to some of the old evils, which have of late years re- 

 appeared in new forms. 



Unhappily, however, the vigilance and activity ot 

 the Legislature, in aU the three kingdoms, and especially 

 in Scotland, died away, or rather suddenly stopped, and 

 a great interval has to be passed over before we find the 

 good work renewed. In truth, till within these two or 

 three years, there had been no legislation worth mention 

 for centuries. This statement, though strictly correct, 

 will astonish many people who have been accustomed to 

 listen to, or even to perpetrate, jokes upon the frequency, 

 or almost constancy, of salmon legislation in our own 

 days, for there is a vast amount of popular misapprehen- 

 sion on this point, chiefly from confounding attempt 



