SHORES OF THE CLYDE AND FIRTH. 
83 
year round, with its heavy ground rope stretched taut 
across between its ploughing irons, the tender spawn of all 
kinds, the scallop included, deposited upon the sands is 
either crushed to pulp and destroyed, or disturbed and set 
adrift from its bed to become an unproductive mass. No 
computation can be made of the destruction of all kinds of 
fish by this instrument. Before its introduction our shores 
and bays swarmed with large and well-filled flat fish, but 
every creek and bank and bay of the river and Firth has 
been dragged and scraped as bare almost as a deserted 
street, and the labours of the poor fishermen have long been 
unproductive. I am told, in particular quarters it is no 
uncommon thing to take up hundredweights of spawn at 
one drag from the banks, which, of course, must be returned 
to the sea; but being once rooted up from its nestling place, 
it is ever after driven about hither and thither with the 
tides, and the chances are that not a third of the spawn so 
disturbed will ever come to maturity. It is time the 
Legislature was wakened up on this subject. No beam- 
trawl, in my opinion, should be allowed to work within 
miles of the spawning banks of any estuary or fishing 
ground. And to begin with our own, a prohibitive line 
should be fixed, stretching on the f»ne side froia Corsal 
Point in Galloway to the Mull of Kintyre on the other, 
inside of which it ought to be punishable to cast a beam- 
trawl."^ If these measures were adopted, in conjunction 
with the cleansing of the Clyde, and prohibiting the throw- 
ing overboard of the refuse already mentioned within a 
given boundary, I am persuaded that the scallop would not 
only return, but all kinds of fish, including the trout, would 
* This has been partly established ; but, through some miscarriage of the 
law, the practice is still continued from the Cumbraes to the Tail of the Bank. 
If it is injurious in one quaiter, it must be so in another. 
