DISTEIBUTION OF SALMON. 469 



in latitiTde 43°. "There is a river in Macedon," says Fluellen, in "King Henry the Fifth," "and 

 there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye, at Monmouth; but it is out of my 

 prains, what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis so like as my fingers is to my 

 fingers, and there is salmons in both." Fluellen was in the wrong, for there are no Salmon in any 

 part of the Mediterranean water system. 



On our own side of the Atlantic, their presence in Hudson's Bay and on the arctic coast of 

 America is doubtful, yet probable. They range far north on the eastern shores of Labrador, and in 

 the waters of the Great Lake system up to Niagara.. 



Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine have many salmon rivers; New Hampshire, Massa- 

 chusetts, and Connecticut, a few very good ones. The natural limit of the southward range of the 

 Salmon appears to be in latitude 41°, near the Connecticut Eiver, where they were once extremely 

 abundant, but many stragglers have been taken in the Housatonic and Hudson. Much eftbrt has 

 been made in trying to prove that the Salmon, of which Hendrick Hudson saw "great store" in 

 1609, when sailing up the river which bears his name, were weak-fish, or some equally remote 

 species. Surely weak-fish do not go up the river to the Highlands. Salmon have from time to 

 time been seen in the Delaware, it is said, and, if this be true, it renders the story of Hudson still 

 more credible. 



Abundance. — Wonderful things are said about their abundance in colonial days. Every one 

 has heard of the ei)icurean apprentices of Connecticut who would eat Salmon no oftener than twice 

 in the week.^ Like many other good ones, this story seems to be prehistoric, and was doubtless told 

 of some other fish in the times when our Aryan ancestors dwelt on the plains of Central Asia. You 

 may find it in Fuller's "Worthies of England," where it has the same archaic and indefinite flavor 

 which is so evident now two centuries later. "Plenty of them in this country," wrote Fuller, 

 "though not in such abundance as in Scotland, where servants (they say) indent with their masters 

 not to be fed therewith above twice a week." There can be no doubt that one hundred years ago 

 salmon flsherj' was an important food resource in Southern New England. Many Connecticut 

 people remember hearing their grandfathers say that when they went to the river to buy shad the 

 fishermen used to stipulate that they should also buy a specified number of Salmon. At the 

 beginning of this century they began rapidly to diminish. Mitchill stated, in 1814, that in 

 former days the supply to the New York market usually came from Connecticut Eiver, but of late 

 years from the Kennebec, cohered with ice. Eev. David Dudley Field, writing in 1819, stated that 

 Salmon had scarcely been seen in the Connecticut for fifteen or twenty years. The circumstances 

 of their extermination in the Connecticut are well known, and the same story, names and date 

 changed, serves equally well for other rivers. 



In 1798 a corporation, known as the "Upper Locks and Canals Company," built a dam sixteen 

 feet high at Miller's Eiver, one hundred miles from the mouth of the Connecticut. For two 

 or three years fish were observed in great abundance below the dam, and for perhaps ten years 

 they continued to appear, vainly striving to reach their si)awning grounds; but soon the work of 

 extermination was complete.^ When, iu 1872, a solitary Salmon made its appearance, the Saybrook 

 fishermen did not know what it was. 



Habits. — At least half of the Salmon's life is spent in the ocean. " He is ever bred in the fresh 

 rivers," said Walton, "and never grows big but in the sea." "He has (like some persons of honour 



' " Thij shad, baas, and Salmon more than half support the province. From the number of seines employed to catch 

 the fish passing up the lakes one might be led to suppose that the whole must be stopped, yet in six months' time they 

 return to the sea with such multitudes of young ones as to fill the Connecticut River for many days, and no finite 

 being can number them." — Peters: History of Connecticut, 1783. 



^ Mitchill and Field. 



