280 Flow to obtain tt. 
the enemies which the young fish have most to dread may per- 
haps be their own parents. It very often happens that a salmon 
has no sooner got rid of its ova than some hungry trout which 
has been lurking in the vicinity, and probably anxiously watching 
the whole operation, goes in and makes a meal of that which with 
proper care might produce hundreds, nay perhaps thousands, of 
fish. Thus the eggs which a salmon may travel over a hundred 
miles to deposit, threading rapids, wriggling over shallows, leaping 
weirs and cascades, and encountering all manner of difficulties 
and dangers by the way, are often destroyed as soon as they are 
shed by the parent fish. 
It is estimated that at least seventy-five per cent. of the eggs 
are lost immediately, and of the other quantity a large portion is 
destroyed in one way or other before hatching takes place. We 
know that whole spawning beds are often washed away, or buried 
many feet deep by the dééris brought down by floods, to say 
nothing of all the host of enemies (animal, vegetable, and mineral) 
that are ranged in battle array against poor unfortunate Salmo 
salar. When we consider for a moment that a single salmon 
deposits in one season, say ten or fifteen thousand eggs, 
according to its weight, and that owing to the great destruction, 
natural and otherwise, not one egg in five hundred produces a 
mature fish, and remember how at this comparatively small rate 
of increase some of our rivers formerly held a goodly number of 
fish, surely it will at once be apparent that if one-fourth of the 
ova annually deposited came to maturity, the rivers would in a 
few years be so full of fish, that it would require some extra means 
of capture for adequately dealing with them, and keeping their 
increasing numbers within bounds. And to the skilled fish 
culturist there is nothing unreasonable in the assumption that 
such a result might be brought about by the simple application of 
the proper means for doing it. 
The work of collecting the ova, being so similar to that 
detailed for trout, needs no further description. That which 
seems to have been rather badly managed is the collection of the 
spawners themselves, before they are ripe, and their retention in 
suitable ponds. The cost of collecting ova in the ordinary way, 
by netting a stream, is very considerable and, as we have seen 
