library of Barcelona, where it is marked with a
note here and there, to guide the singer under
the shade or by the fountain.

SALMON.

WE are most of us accustomed daily to
sit down to a good dinner, whereat fish,
flesh, and fowl are presented in various tempting
forms to our appetites. But does it ever
occur to the diner to consider whence come
all these luxuries? Does he ever reflect
upon the amount of labour, intelligence, and
capital, that must be expended before he can
take his bit of fish, his slice of roast beef, or
his wing of a pheasant? Thank goodness we
are not likely to run short of the two former
articles, but we think our guest would drop his
knife and fork, open his eyes pretty widely,
were we to tell him that there is a great
probability that in a few more years there will be
no more salmon to be had for money, that fish,
inhabitants of both fresh and salt water, are
becoming every year more and more scarce,
and that he must soon dine fishless. Since
the creation of man, many creatures have
positively perished from off the face of the
earth, many wantonly destroyed, more
consigned to the boiling pot and the spit. It
will doubtless be news to many that, among
the silent effects which our present age is
producing upon the animal creation—one of those
mighty results which silently and slowly grow
from day to day, from year to year, till at last
they burst upon our view a stupendous fact, a
thundering avalanche composed of thousands
of minute flakes of snow—is the gradual
extinction of the salmon. The cry of "Salmon
in danger!" is now resounding throughout the
length and breadth of the land. A few years, a
little more over-population, a few more tons of
factory poison, a few fresh poaching devices and
newly-invented contrivances to circumvent
victims, and the salmon will bo gone—he will
become extinct. In all human probability, our
grandchildren will be as proud of knowing "a
man who has tasted a salmon" as even we, in
the present day, are of the acquaintance of a
friend who has eaten a salmon caught in the
river Thames. Here is a great fact under our
very noses. Salmon lie on the marble slabs of
Billingsgate and Hungerford, shining beauties,
plump and of good kind, radiant in their
lustrous silver coats. But whence come they?
From north, south, east and west. From the
Thames ? No, not one. Yet the time was, and
this no more than sixty years ago, when the
salmon-fishers drew their nets at the village of
Barnes; when they covered the shingle there
with shining fish, and sent off in a tax-cart fish
to market, caught not eight miles from London-
bridge. Here is a fact patent to all, and within
the actual experience of many. What has
happened to the Thames will, in all likelihood,
happen first to one river then to another within
the British Isles, and gradually, slowly, the race
will become extinct.

And are we, active, healthy Englishmen in
heart and soul, full of veneration for our
ancestors, and thoughtful for the yet unborn, upon
whom the honour of this country will depend in
future generations, to stand still with arms
folded, and allow this great evil to continue?
Shall we not rather face the truth, throw
off all disguise, and probe the mischief to its
bottom? Shall we not step in between wanton
destruction and fair allowance of capture, be it
by net or rod, and so ward off the obloquy which
will be attached to our age, when the historian
of 1961 will be forced to record "that the
inhabitants of the last century destroyed the
salmon, and did much injury to other species
of fish now so rare in this country?"

We know the trite story of a patient being
under several quack oculists for inflammation of
the eye. The poor man was leeched, blistered,
physicked, and green-shaded, all to no purpose.
At last he went to an army surgeon, who looked
in his eye, and found a great bit of cinder from
a railway engine, which had been keeping up all
the irritation. The salmon doctors must go to
work in the same way. They must find out the
reason why salmon should be now so scarce, as
is proved by the price of the daily markets. Let
us contrast the present prices with those of
former years. We read in tho daily papers:
"Billingsgate Market, June 18, 1861, salmon,
Is. to Is. 6d. per pound." A different state of
things, this, from the times when, according to
an old story, apprentices bargained that they
should not be fed with salmon more than three
times a week. This story has of late been doubted.
I bring three witnesses, who write in the Field
newspaper, March 2, 1S61, to prove it. Mr.
G. Shotton, of South Shields, says: "My uncle,
a magistrate of the borough, and eighty years
old, tells me, I have seen and read an indenture
of apprenticeship of a boy to a boat-builder of
this town, where it was expressly conditioned
that the apprentice was not to be fed upon
salmon oftener than three times a week." Mr.
G. H. Smith, Hansworth, Birmingham, says:
"My father, who died last year, aged seventy-
eight, said he himself had once put his name to
a draper's apprentice's indentures at Worcester,
in which it was distinctly worded that the
apprentice should not be compelled to eat salmon
more than three times a week. I myself have
known sewin, caught in theTivy, at Carmarthen,
cried through that town at 2½d. per pound by
the public crier, about twenty-five years since."
X Y X says: "I can produce plenty of credible
evidence that on the shores of the Solway Firth
farmers' servants formerly rebelled in their
hirings against salmon altogether, by reason
of the almost daily repetition of them."

Here is a sad contrast: the salmon doctors
must, therefore, deal with the exciting causes
of the complaint, and one by one must get rid
of them. What are these causes? First and
foremost, nets and paid engines (the angler's
aversion)— nets in all forms, shapes, and sizes
—nets half as long as Regent-street, and as deep
as the first-floor windows are high—nets placed