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Our county depends for its fishes on the Thames which bounds it from the City Stone at Staines up to Remenham just below Henley, on the famous regatta course, and on several tributaries, or rather portions of them. These are the Colne, which divides Buckinghamshire from Hertfordshire for a short distance ; and the Thame, which for a portion of its sinuous course divides our county from Oxfordshire. The Ouse, generally connected with Bedfordshire, flows across the northern side of Buckinghamshire. If we except char ; that curious member of the cod family, the burbot or eel pout ; the migratory salmonidas and one or two species only found in lakes, Buckinghamshire can provide specimens of practically all the freshwater forms found in Great Britain. Time was of course when salmon and sea trout came up our premier river. At the commencement of the last century the Thames was a salmon river, and if the experiments which are being made by the Thames Salmon Associa- tion, led by Mr. W. H. Grenfell, M.P., prove a success and those directing its affairs seem assured that salmon can be made to ascend the river restocking will doubtless be carried out on a large scale, and the fish permanently reintroduced. When we find smelts, a fairly delicate fish, making their way up from the sea through the foul water of the estuary as far as Teddington, it may fairly be surmised that salmon could make the same journey. In all probability the obstructions in the river and pollution have a good deal to do with their absence, while the heavy netting which used to take place probably succeeded in ultimately exterminating the few fish which, pollution notwithstanding, endeavoured to fight their way up to the spawning beds. The opinion has been expressed that to turn the Thames into a salmon river is merely a matter of money, but it is nearly certain that, in consequence of the unsatis- factory spawning beds and the pollution of the water in winter from well manured agricultural land, salmon, which breed best in a wild country, will never become numerous in the river, unless salmon culture is carried out on an enormous scale, as is done by the United States Fish Commission in the case of those rivers where the fish are caught and tinned for the English and other markets.

It is an unfortunate fact that the tendency in a highly civilized and thickly populated country is to destroy rivers so far as their suitability for fish is concerned. That notable little river at High Wycombe, for instance, is more or less ruined as a trout stream by occasional pollutions from paper mills. It is a water which in the by no means remote past