142 " PAEK-ICIDE." 



ing whatever quantity the current carries down. Then the water- 

 fowl eagerly pounces on the precious deposit the moment it has 

 been forsaken by the fish ; and if it escape being gobbled up by 

 such cormorants, the spawn may be washed away by a ilood, or 

 the position of the bed may be altered, and the ova be destroyed 

 perhaps for want of water. As an instance of the loss incidental 

 to salmon-spawning in the natural way, I may just mention that 

 a whitling of about three-quarters of a pound weight has been 

 taken in the Tay with three hundred impregnated salmon ova 

 in its stomach ! If this fish had been allowed to dine and 

 breakfast at this rate during the whole of the spawning season 

 it would have been difficult to estimate the loss our fisheries 

 sustained by his voracity. No sooner do the eggs ripen, and the 

 young fish come to life, than they are exposed, in their defence- 

 less state, to be preyed upon by all the enemies already enumer- 

 ated ; while as parr they have been taken out of our streams 

 in such quantities as to be available for the purposes of pig- 

 feeding and as manm-e ! Some economists estimate that only 

 one egg out of every thousand ever becomes a full-grown salmon. 

 Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart calculated that one hundred and fifty 

 millions of salmon ova are annually deposited in the river Tay ; 

 of which only fifty millions, or one-third, come to life and attain 

 the parr stage, that twenty millions of these parrs in time become 

 smolts, and that their number is ultimately diminished to 

 100,000 ; of which 70,000 are caught, the other 30,000 being 

 left for breeding purposes. Sir Humphrey Davy calculates that 

 if a salmon produce 17,000 roe, only 800 of these will arrive at 

 maturity. It is well, therefore, that the female fish yields 

 1000 eggs for each pound of her weight ; for a lesser degree of 

 fecundity, keeping in view the enormous waste of life indicated 

 by these figures, would long since — especially taking into account 

 the destructive modes of fishing that used a few years ago to be 

 iu use — have resulted in the utter extinction of this valuable fish. 

 The increased value of all kinds of fish food during late 

 years has engendered in lessees a degree of avarice that leads 

 to the capture and sale of almost everything that bears the 

 shape of fish. The tenant of a salmon-fishery has but one 

 desire, and that is to earn his rent and get as much profit as he 

 can. To achieve this end he takes all the fish that come to his 

 net, no matter of what size -they may be. It is not his interest 

 to let a single one escape, because if he did so his neighbour 

 above or below him on the water would in all probability 



