So many books have been written during the last few years about this beautiful and valuable animal that I do not require to occupy a very large portion of this work with either its natural or economic history; for of the two hundred and fifty kinds of fish which inhabit the rivers and seas of Britain, the salmon (_Salmo salar_) is the one about which we know more than any other, and chiefly for these reasons:—It is of greater value as property than any other fish; its large size better admits of observation than smaller members of the fish tribe; and, in consequence of its migratory instinct, we have access to it at those seasons of its life when to observe its habits is the certain road to information. And yet, with all these advantages, or rather in consequence of them, there has been a vast amount of controversy, oral and written, as to the birth, breeding, and growth of the salmon. There have been controversies as to the impregnation of its eggs, as to the growth of the fish from the parr to the smolt stage; also as to the kind of food it eats, how long it remains in the salt water, and whether it makes one or two voyages to the sea per annum. There has likewise been a grilse controversy, as well as a rate-of-growth quarrel. These scientific and literary combats have been fought at intervals, and, to speak generally, have exhibited the temper and the learning of the combatants in about equal proportions. The dates of these controversies are not so easily fixed as might be desired, seeing that they are either scattered at intervals throughout the Transactions of learned societies, buried in heavy encyclopædias, or altogether lost in the columns of newspapers. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that during the past quarter of a century there has been a committee of inquiry either in the House of Lords or Commons, a royal commission, a blue book, or an Act of Parliament, every year on behalf of the salmon, besides numerous publications by private individuals. Although no person now believes the assertion of the Billingsgate naturalist, that salmon-eggs come to maturity in a period of forty-eight hours, or that other authority who told the world that as soon as the fish burst from the ovum—a smolt six inches long coming out of a pea!—it was conducted to the sea by its parents, there is much of the romantic in the history of this monarch of the brook, and about the manner in which the varied disputed points have been solved, if indeed some of these points be yet completely settled. I shall not again enter into the impregnation theory, having said as much as was necessary about that portion of my subject in a previous division of this work; but will proceed at once to give a summary of the parr controversy, and a few statements about the grilse and the full-grown fish as well. [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration]