SALMONS. 
233 
weight. Salmon of thirty and even forty pounds 
are by no means uncommon ; one has been killed 
by the angler’s rod which weighed sixty -nine 
pounds and three quarters, and Mr. Yarrell has 
recorded the occurrence of one in the London 
market of the astonishing weight of eighty-three 
pounds. The head of the Salmon is small, the 
mouth not deeply cleft ; the body is thick and 
muscular, but with gracefully swelling outlines, 
tapering evenly away to the tail ; the caudal fin 
is slightly hollowed. The colours are blackish- 
grey on the upper parts, lead-grey on the sides, 
and silvery on the belly : a few dark spots are 
scattered over the back ; and the fins assume the 
same colours as the regions whence they origi- 
nate. 
The marketable demand for this excellent fish 
has made it the subject of important fisheries ; 
and as it can be taken with advantage only in 
rivers connected with territorial rights, and only 
at the particular season already mentioned, these 
fisheries are the subject of careful legislative pre- 
scriptions. To describe the various modes em- 
ployed in the capture of the Salmon in British 
rivers alone would far exceed our space ; we can 
do little more than allude to them. Nets of many 
kinds, and traps of ingenious device, are sometimes 
stretched across the stream, to arrest the fish in 
its ascending course ; sometimes, as in the Forth, 
bag-nets are dropped from projecting platforms or 
stages ; or, as in the Solway, the fishes are received 
into funnel-shaped nets carried at the end of a 
long pole. In the Severn, the Welsh fishermen, 
seated in their funny little boats called coracles^ 
drag a net between two, with which they take 
