186 THE SALMON. 



in question. " Forty years," is the present cry of the 

 owners of sea-shore fixtures ; but the owners of river and 

 estuary fisheries, when it was long ago and often pro- 

 posed to do to them what it is now proposed to do to 

 the coast-fishers, might have cried "Ten times forty 

 years/' and could have pointed to charters and laws ex- 

 pressly giving them what the law afterwards took away 

 from them ; while the owners of sea-shore fisheries can- 

 not show any charter in which their engines are autho- 

 rized or mentioned, or any law in which they are men- 

 tioned, except to be prohibited. Even as matter of fact, 

 the statement that these nets have existed on the sea- 

 shore for more than forty years is not true, except to a 

 very limited extent ; it is only two or three of the 

 earliest of them that can' boast that degree of antiquity. 

 It may be desirable to explain, in passing, that in 

 denying to stake and bag nets the antiquity even of forty 

 years, we are putting out of view the district of the 

 Solway. For that exclusion there are several good rea- 

 sons — such as, that the Solway was never under the 

 general Scotch law, but had nominally a law, and practi- 

 cally a lawlessness of its own ; and that the Solway is 

 an estuary, whereas we have been speaking of the period 

 of the erection of fixed engines upon the shore of the 

 sea. The Solway, in fact, was not only not under the 

 protection of either Scotch or English law, but was spe- 

 cially and designedly left unprotected. The reason for 

 this, on the Scotch side, was candidly stated in an Act 

 passed at the time of the union of the Crowns : " because 

 the rivers at that tyme devyded at many points the 

 bounds of England and Scotland,- whereby the forbear- 



