THE GROWTH OF SALMON. 29 



journ in fresh waters, it ascends the river, its roe or spawn develop- 

 ing as it ascends ; till, about Christmas-time, or sometimes earlier, it 

 reaches the shallow head-streams of the river, in the gravelly beds of 

 which it deposits its eggs, returning immediately afterward to the sea, 

 no longer in the bright, plump, muscular condition in which it ascended, 

 but a lean, lank, ugly, wounded beast, which one would hardly recog- 

 nize as Salmo salar. Fig. 5 represents the head of a " kelt," as those 

 salmon are called which have newly spawned. The curved projection, 

 or hook, on the lower jaw, is a cartilaginous membrane, the use of 

 which nobody knows. The fish is in a very weakly condition, as his 

 fat is gone, and he perhaps assumes this appearance to frighten other 

 animals, which might otherwise be tempted to attack him. The 

 drawing is taken from the photograph of a salmon, weighing twenty 

 pounds, which was found dead on the banks of one of our Welsh rivers. 



Fig. 4. 



a 



Young Salmon Sis Weeks old. 

 a, Z>, c, size of salmon at two, three, and four months respectively. 



This fish, had it survived, would have returned to sea, recovered 

 its fat, and presently come back worth £2 or £3, whereas, by dying 

 in this condition, it was worth nothing. It had, however, done its 

 duty by depositing perhaps 16,000 eggs. Only a very small percent- 

 age, however, of the eggs laid ever become adult fish. Floods wash 

 them out of their gravel nests ; ducks, and other birds, eat them ; 

 beetles and various insects attack them ; they are smothered with 

 mud, or left high and dry on the shore ; the young fish are poisoned 

 by pollutions, or diverted into mill-leats and canals, and so lost ; trout 

 eat them wholesale ; in fact, the whole of their earliest existence is a 

 very living death, and it is a wonder, with all the ordeals they have 

 to pass through, that we have any salmon left. To kill them legiti- 

 mately for food for ourselves is bad enough, and we ought to do all 

 we can to protect them when young. 



In the artificial system of breeding salmon the adult fish are caught 

 just as they are on the spawning-beds, and the eggs taken from them ; 

 the ova and milt are properly mixed together, and the eggs placed in 



