_Friend_—“Toots, toots, Jamie! hoo can it manage till do that; hoo, in the name o’ wonder, can a fish, travelling up a turbid water frae the sea, know when it reaches the entrance to its birthplace, or that it has arrived at the tributary that was its cradle?” _Shepherd_—“Man, the great wonder to me is no hoo the fish get back, but hoo they find their way till the sea first ava, seein’ that they’ve never been there afore!” The parr question, however, was determined in a rather more formal mode than that adopted by the author of “Bonny Kilmenny.” Mr. Shaw, a forester in the employment of the Duke of Buccleuch, took up the case of the parr in 1833, and succeeded in solving the problem. In order that he might watch the progressive growth of the parr, Mr. Shaw began by capturing seven of these little fishes on the 11th of July 1833; these he placed in a pond supplied by a stream of excellent water, where they grew and flourished apace till early in April 1834, between which date and the 17th of the following May they became smolts; and all who saw them on that day when they were caught by Mr. Shaw were thoroughly convinced that they were true salmon smolts. In March 1835 Mr. Shaw repeated his experiments with twelve parrs of a larger size, taken also from the river. On being transferred to the pond, these so speedily acquired the scales of the smolt that Mr. Shaw assumed a period of two years as being the time at which the change took place from the parr to the smolt. The late Mr. Young of Invershin, a well-known authority on salmon life, was experimenting at the same time as Mr. Shaw, and for the same purpose—namely, to determine if parr were the young of the salmon, and, if so, at what period they became smolts and proceeded to the sea. Well, Mr. Shaw said two years, and Mr. Young, who was at that time manager of the Duke of Sutherland’s fisheries, said the change took place in twelve months; others, again, who took an interest in the controversy, said that three years elapsed before the change was made. The various parties interested held each their own opinion, and it may even be said that the disputation still goes on; for although a numerous array of facts bearing on the migration have been gathered, we are still in ignorance of any regulating principle on which the migratory change is based, or to account for the impulse which impels a brood of fish to proceed to sea divided into two moieties. Mr. Shaw watched his young fry with unceasing care, and described their growth with great minuteness, for a period extending over two years, when his parrs became smolts. Mr. Young, in a letter from Invershin, dated January 1853, says, pointedly enough—“The fry remain in the river one whole year, from the time they are hatched to the time they assume their silvery coat and take their first departure for the sea. All the experiments we have made on the ova and fry of the salmon have exactly corresponded to the same effects, and none of them