"I would recommend any one who wishes to show his day's sport in the pink of perfection, to keep his trouts in a wet cloth, so that, on his return home, he may exhibit them to his admiring friends, and extract from them the most approved of epithets and exclamations, taking the praise bestowed upon the fish as a particular compliment to himself."--P. 56. British legislators ought certainly to consider the recent completion of our knowledge both of salmon and sea-trout; and if they can make themselves masters of their more detailed local history, so much the better. Mr Home Drummond's is still the regulating Act of Parliament, and seems to have kept its ground firmly, notwithstanding many attempted alterations, if not amendments. In accordance with that Act, all our rivers north of the Tweed close on the 14th of September, and do not re-open till the 1st of February.[14] This bears hardly upon some of our northern streams. In the Ness, for example, before the application of the existing laws, more fish were wont to be killed in December and January than during most other periods of the year.[15] It appears to have been clearly ascertained that the season of a river (in respect to its being early or late) depends mainly upon the temperature of its waters. The Ness, which is the earliest river in Scotland, scarcely ever freezes. It flows from the longest and deepest loch in Britain; and thus, when the thermometer, as it did in the winter of 1807, stands at 20, 30, or even 40 deg. below the freezing point at Inverness, it makes little or no impression upon either lake or river. The course of the latter is extremely short. The Shin is also an early river, flowing from a smaller loch, though with a more extended course before it enters the Kyle of Sutherland, where it becomes confluent with the Oykel waters. It may so happen, that in these and other localities, a colder stream, drawing its shallow and divided sources from the frozen sides of barren mountains, may adjoin the lake-born river, and "On that flood, Indurated and fix'd, the snowy weight Lies undissolved, while silently beneath, And unperceived, the current steals away."