FUTURE SALMON LEGISLATION. 189 



was suppressed. It was only after all this that the kinds 

 of nets now under question were set up at the places 

 where they now abound. The year 1821 was the date 

 when the first stake-net was erected on the shore of the 

 sea. The place was Dunninald in Forfarshire ; the rent 

 — so entirely novel was the experiment — was at first 

 ^very fifth fish, but at the end of three years was made 

 £400 in money ; and the man who did the deed is still 

 alive, and (strange to say) happy. 



But, though the facts as to the real age of the engines 

 now in dispute were otherwise, it would be monstrous to 

 infer that what has existed for forty years has thereby 

 acquired a right to exist throughout all ages, especially 

 when it is plain as day that the whole scope and prin- 

 ciple of the fishery laws, extending over centuries, has 

 been to restrain or suppress whatever was found to be 

 inequitable or' injurious, without regard to the date or 

 circumstances of its introduction. " Prescription," there- 

 fore, must go out of the controversy as an impostor 

 and interloper. 



Neither is it of any avail to say that those sea-shore 

 fisheries cannot be fished by any mode but the newly- 

 devised one ; because, in the first place, it is not and 

 cannot be true ; and in the second place, because if it 

 were true, it would be nothing to the purpose, seeing 

 that the same plea might be raised for large stretches of 

 river as well as of shore, and that it is just saying that 

 the sea-shore fisheries have not any value but that which 

 consists of value taken from their neighbours, by means 

 which their neighbours are denied. All the charters were 

 granted, and all the fisheries fished, long before the modes 



