284 APPENDIX. 



years the fisheries improved wonderfully ; but as they 

 began to improve, and the style of fishing began to pay 

 well, fixed nets, hitherto but little known on the Irish 

 coasts, began to make their appearance. The more the 

 fisheries improved the more these nets increased, and to 

 such a degree that the rivers again began to suffer very 

 severely. Small, rivers were entirely extinguished by 

 them, larger ones did not pay the up-stream proprietors 

 for looking after them ; and poaching can never he sup- 

 pressed, if the up-stream proprietors do not strenuously set 

 their faces against it. 



The system was manifestly ruinous, unfair, and illegal. 

 Suppose I own a river fifty miles long, I incur a great 

 expense and a vast amount of trouble to get up a stock 

 of salmon. The salmon go down to the sea, and some 

 fellow who has hired fifty yards of seabeach runs out a 

 fixed net half-a-mile long, and catches nearly every one 

 of my fish. I have spent money and trouble for nothing; 

 the stranger has ruined my river and destroyed all the 

 ■salmon; and finding that it does not pay to fish his net 

 longer, he takes it up and goes elsewhere to repeat his 

 destruction. This was, actually and literally, what has 

 been until lately occurring in Ireland. Happily new 

 laws have, if not entirely yet largely, abolished these 

 destructive engines, and we trust to the fature to show 

 the wisdom of these enactments. 



If a sufficient quantity of fish are not allowed to run 

 up a river to etock it, the river must decrease rapidly ia 

 production ; for vast as is the natural fecundity of the 

 'saknon, yet so numerous are its enemies, and so large a 



