HARD WICKE'S SCIENCE- G OSS IP. 



169 



A LANCASHIRE NATURALIST-THOMAS GARNETT. 



By WILLIAM E. A. AXON. 



MEMORIAL 

 volume of the 

 late Mr. Thomas 

 Gamett, of Low 

 Moor, Clitheroe, 

 was printed for 

 private circula- 

 tion, and some 

 notice of it will 

 be of interest to 

 many outside the 

 narrow circle for 

 whom it ■ was 

 originally pre- 

 p a r ed. 'Mr. 

 Thomas Gamett 

 was one of three 

 brothers. Mr. 

 Richard Gamett 

 distinguished 

 himself as a phi- 

 lologist, and became an assistant keeper in the 

 British Museum ; Mr. Jeremiah Garnett was for 

 many years the editor of the "Manchester Guardian," 

 and Mr. Thomas Garnett settled at Clitheroe, 

 where he passed an active life as a manufacturer, 

 but instead of allowing business to absorb all his 

 attention he found pleasant and healthful recrea- 

 tion in agricultural and scientific observation. The 

 results are now gathered in this volume — "Essays 

 in Natural History and Agriculture, by the late 

 Thomas Gamett of Low Moor, Clitheroe. London : 

 printed at the Chiswick Press, 1883." Only 250 

 copies were printed. The editing has been the 

 work of the author's nephew, that accomplished 

 scholar and friend of all students, Dr. Richard 

 Garnett of the British Museum. The first paper 

 contains a number of facts and observations relating 

 to the salmon, chiefly based on Mr. Gamett's ex- 

 perience in Lancashire. Written as long ago as 1834, 

 it contains a plea in favour of a wise and not vexatious 

 measure for the protection of the salmon fisheries. 

 No. 332. — August 1892. 



He believed that the salmon enters and ascends- 

 rivers for other purposes than propagation. In sup- 

 port of this view he cites what in Lancashire is called 

 " streaming." Thus in winter the fish not engaged 

 in spawning, trout, grayling, chub, dace, etc., leave 

 the streams and go into deep water. Another reason 

 is their impatience of heat, which leads the grayling, if 

 the weather is unusually hot at the end of May or 

 beginning of June, to ascend the mill-streams in the 

 Wharfe, by hundreds, and to go up the mill-races as 

 far as they can get. The " salmon " par he holds to' 

 be neither a hybrid, nor a distinct species, but a state 

 of the common salmon. In 185 1 he wrote some 

 papers describing his own experiments in the arti- 

 ficial breeding of salmon. His interest in the fish is 

 shown by the following quotation : — 



" I have had fish sent from two different gentle- 

 men living on the banks of the reservoirs belonging 

 to the Liverpool waterworks ; these were beautiful 

 fish, three in number, more like the sea trout than 

 the salmon, and the largest of them weighing two 

 pounds. I had put them into the brooks running 

 into the reservoirs three years before. I also learn 

 that a beautiful specimen of the Ombre chevalier 

 (French char) was taken out of Rivington reservoir. 

 About a thousand had been put in by me two years 

 before." 



It should be mentioned that Mr. Garnett's experi- 

 ments on the artificial impregnation of fish ova were 

 made without any knowledge of previous attempts of 

 the same kind. In answer to a suggestion made by 

 Mr. Garnett, the late Sir G. C. Lewis observed : 

 " You might as well propose to shoot partridges only 

 three days a week as to restrict the netting of salmon 

 to only three days.". In 1859 Mr. Garnett .wrote 

 some papers on the possibility of introducing salmon 

 into Australia, and addressed a communication to the 

 authorities of Tasmania and New Zealand on the 

 subject. He had some doubts as to success, but 

 thought that the experiment should be made, and 

 that New Zealand was the likeliest place for the 

 experiment. In 1843, 1844, 1845, and '84S, he 



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