Other instances of war-like doings along the banks of this river might be recounted, but as the neighbourhoods in which they occurred are not enclosed within the Fylde boundaries, we are perforce obliged to exclude them from this volume, and must refer those of our readers who are anxious to learn more both of them and of the river itself to other sources for the required information. The chief fish of the Ribble is of course its salmon, but in addition the estuary contains numbers of flounders and other varieties of the finny tribes similar to those found in the tidal portion of the Wyre. During the sixteenth century sturgeons seem to have been captured occasionally in the Ribble, and amongst the records of the duchy in 1536, there is a complaint that when “one certain sturgeon was found within the township of Warton and seized for the use of the King (who held the right of fishery there), and laid up in a house in Warton, one Christopher Bone, of Warton, and James Bradʳton, of the ley, with divers riotous persons, about the 6th of May last, did then and there take out of the said house the said sturgeon, and the said Bone hath at divers times and in like manner taken sturgeons and porpoises to his own use and the injury of his majesty.”[58] As such a small part, and that far from the most important, of Ribble stream is really connected with the Fylde, and as it is not our intention to trespass beyond the limits of that district,—at least not knowingly, and the margin in the present instance is so clearly defined that no excuse could be offered for overstepping it,—we are compelled to content ourselves with this brief account, leaving much unsaid that is of considerable historical and general interest. THE SEA which washes over the westerly shore of the Fylde forms part of St. George’s Channel or the Irish Sea, whilst the narrow northern boundary of the same district is limited by the waters of Morecambe Bay. The main peculiarities to be noticed along the extensive line of this coast swept over by the billows of the Irish Sea, are the almost entire absence of seaweeds and the levelness of the sands; indeed, so gentle is the slope of the latter that its average declivity has been estimated at no more than one foot in every fifty yards, and to the flatness of this surface it is due that the beach is in a very great measure freed from putrifying heaps of fish and seaweed, for the rising tides glide with such swiftness over the level sandy beds that most driftmatters and impurities are left behind in the depths beyond low water mark. An analysis, made by Dr. Schweitzer, of the waters of the English coast, furnishes the following result:—