Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. DECAY OF SALMON. Amount of the Decay—Periods—Causes. Great as has been the decay in the supply of Salmon in the United Kingdom, there has been a tendency to rate that decay rather above than below its true amount. That the numbers of a fish of such quality, haunts, and habits must tend to diminish, or can be maintained only by increased care and legislative aid, in countries where population and industries are great and growing, is sufficiently obvious. The obstacles to the fish performing its natural journeys and functions, the number and efficiency of the instruments of capture, the demand for the product as food, all increase, and all tend to increase the pressure upon the supply beyond the powers of reproduction. Still there have been some serious mistakes in estimating, or rather assuming, the amount as well as the periods of the decline. It has been a good deal forgotten that the excessive plenty of olden times, besides being somewhat more matter of tradition than of evidence, was rather a partial or local than a general or national plenty; and also that in later times the great impoverishment of many of the principal fisheries represented rather a temporary enrichment of other andnewer fisheries than a general decay. That salmon have greatly diminished, are even still diminishing, and ought to be increased, are all truths. What is here sought to be guarded against is merely the deduction that that diminution is to be measured either by the decrease in the yield of some of what used to be the most productive fisheries, or by the facts that formerly salmon were in some places a cheap and abundant commodity, and now are everywhere a costly luxury. The ease and rapidity with which scarcity can be inflicted on a natural product such as salmon are visible e...