Mr Holdsworth expresses strong regret that the prospects of the Irish fisheries are not by any means of a promising kind, as far as the cultivation of the art or industry is concerned. All authorities agree in regarding the coasts of Ireland in most instances as representing fishing-grounds in which stores of wealth lie unheeded and uncared for. This is a state of matters much to be deplored, for the sake of all parties concerned—fishermen, consumers, and the nation at large. Some years ago, when we were in Ireland, we heard it mentioned that much of the fish sold in Dublin was supplied by fishermen from the coast of Wales; and we likewise heard that large quantities of dried white-fish were introduced to Portrush by fishermen from Islay and other western isles of Scotland. Though it is stated that the famine of thirty years ago has had much to do with the depressed state of the Irish fisheries, and that emigration has also affected them, we yet fail to see why, by a little enterprise, the still resident natives should not be able to beat both the Welsh and Scotch out of their own market.
As regards the salmon fisheries, Mr Young leads us into a region which is still in some particulars a field of debate and controversy. There are very few readers, it may be presumed, who are ignorant of the controversies, for instance, which have been carried on concerning the correct answer to the question, ‘Are parr the young of salmon?’—a query which Mr Young, along with the great majority of naturalists, answers unhesitatingly in the affirmative. The natural history of the salmon forms the starting-point of all knowledge of the fish, and of the information necessary for determining the conditions under which it may be properly and successfully caught—the terms ‘properly’ and ‘successfully’ in this case being taken as including the best interests of the fish and its race, as well as the interests of its human captors. Briefly detailed, the life-history of a salmon may be said to begin with the ascent of the parent-fishes in autumn and early winter to the upper reaches of our rivers for the purpose of depositing their eggs. In each salmon-mother it has been calculated about nine hundred eggs exist for every pound of her weight, and these eggs she deposits in a trench, excavated by aid of the jaw, in the gravelly bed of the stream. Fertilised after being deposited, by the milt of the male parent, the latter covers the eggs with gravel by means of his fins—the tail-fin being, as far as can be ascertained, the chief agent and means in effecting this necessary action. Such eggs as escape the attack of enemies—and of these, in the shape of aquatic birds and of other fishes, the salmon-ova have more than enough—undergo development, and are hatched in from ninety to one hundred and thirty days.