Page:Natural History, Fishes.djvu/247

Rh 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 graceful 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 originate.

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 prescriptions. To describe the various modes employed 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