F. day: early and late salmon rivers. 



21 



ber i st. For treating all rivers in an identical manner, whether clean 

 fish were present early or late in the season, and insisting upon fishing 

 beginning or leaving off on a specified day in all, was, as illustrated 

 by a Highland Laird, when before the Salmon Commission of 1825, 

 about ' as sensible a plan as it would be to prohibit the farmers of 

 England from cutting their crops till the harvests were ready in the 

 Highlands.' 



G. Little, giving evidence before the Parliamentary Commission 

 in 1824, observed 'that the Eden is earlier than the Esk or the 

 Annan ; the fish enter it earlier than they do the others by nearly six 

 weeks. . . . Fishing in the Solway, the Eden, and the Dee at 

 Kirkcudbright, might commence on the 2nd of February; but in the 

 Annan, the Esk, and the Nith, should not begin earlier than the 

 middle of March. . . . The salmon that are caught in the Dee 

 are quite out of season fully a month before they are in the Nith and 

 the Annan • these are two very late rivers.' He likewise stated that 

 in the Nith last season his tenant commenced on the nth March. 

 He was informed that he then killed upwards of 200 salmon, some of 

 them positively not spawned. 



James Gillies deposed (1824) respecting the Tay, where he had 

 fished for twenty-six years, that ' when I went to Perth first, most of 

 the river was over w r ith spawning at December, but you will now 

 scarcely see one fish come there to the redd till about the end of 

 November, and the throng time for spawning is generally in the 

 months of December and January.' 



Yarrell considered .that 'rivers issuing from large lakes afford 

 early salmon, the waters having been purified by deposition in the 

 lakes • on the other hand, rivers swollen by melting snows in the 

 spring months are later in their season of producing fish, and yield 

 their supply when the lake rivers are beginning to fail.' The general 

 impression seems to have been that the temperature of the river water 

 exercised some influence in acting upon the time at which they w r ere 

 ascended by salmon when desirous of entering for breeding purposes, 

 they usually first selecting such as were the warmest. 



Sir William Jardine observed that the causes influencing ascent 

 are as yet undecided, and that where the time varies much in neigh- 

 bouring rivers they are less easy of solution. With but few exceptions 

 the northern rivers are the earliest, and it has been suggested that this 

 variation in the season may be dependent upon the temperature of 

 the water, and that such Highland rivers as have their origin in large 

 lochs are all early owing to the great mass and warmer temperature at 

 their sources, and that the eggs in such localities are earlier hatched. 

 Thus th e Oykel, in Sutherlandshire, springs from a small Alpine lake, 



Jan. 1886. 



