are allowed to ascend the river, that no one has any interest in
protecting them in close time, and the consequence is, as might be
expected, that all sorts of contrivances for taking them are
resorted to: they are speared and netted in the streams by day and
night; they are caught with the fly, they are taken with switch
hooks (large hooks fixed to the ends of staves), or with a triple
hook fixed to the end of a running line and a salmon rod; if the
river becomes low, parties of idle fellows go up each side of it
in search of them, and by stoning the deeps, or dragging a horse's
skull, or large bone of any kind through them, they compel the
fish to _side_, and there they fall an easy prey, in most cases
where the pool is of small extent. In a river so small as the
Ribble, it will be readily believed that not many fish can deposit
their spawn in safety, when practices of this kind are followed
almost openly, and when no one feels a sufficient interest in the
matter to put a stop to them. A single party of poachers killed
four hundred Salmon in one spawning season near the source of the
river; the roe of which, when potted, they sold for L20. Need we
be surprised, then, if the breed decreases? The only wonder is that
they have not been exterminated long ago.

I may perhaps be allowed to say what, in my opinion, would remedy
this alarming destruction, particularly as no one hitherto seems
to have devised an efficient preventive. I believe that in 1826
there was an Act of Parliament passed which either repealed or
modified some of the old laws on the subject, and I have also
understood that the good effects of this new law are already
perceptible in Scotland, to which it is exclusively applied. There
was a bill introduced into Parliament in 1825 which was intended
to apply to the whole kingdom; but some of the clauses were so
very objectionable, that if they had been carried they could not
possibly have been enforced without stopping and ruining the
manufactories which were carried on by water-power, and the bill
was consequently abandoned. The first thing to be done is to give
the proprietors on the upper part of the river such an interest in
the fisheries as will make them anxious about the preservation of
the fish in the spawning season; and to accomplish so desirable an
object no one ought to fish or keep a net stretched across a river
for more than twelve hours each day, or from sunrise to sunset;
and every mill-ow