which 70,000 are caught, the other 30,000 being left for breeding purposes. Sir Humphry Davy calculated that if a salmon produced 17,000 roe, only 800 of these would arrive at maturity. It is well, therefore, that the female fish yields 1,000 eggs for each pound of her weight; for a lesser degree of fecundity, keeping in view the enormous waste of life indicated by these figures, would long since—especially taking into account the destructive modes of fishing that used a few years ago to be in use—have resulted in the extinction of this valuable fish. “The first person who ‘took a thought about the matter’—_i.e._, as to whether the parr was or was not the young of the salmon—and arrived at a solid conclusion, was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who, in his usual impulsive way, proceeded to verify his opinions. He had, while herding sheep, many opportunities of watching the fishing streams, and, like most of his class, he wielded his fishing‐rod with considerable skill. While angling in the tributaries of some of the Border salmon‐streams, he had often caught the parr as it was changing into the smolt, and had, after close observation, come to the conclusion that the little parr was none other than the infant salmon. Mr. Hogg did not keep his discovery a secret, and the more his facts were controverted by the naturalists of the day the louder became his proclamations. He had suspected all his life that parr were salmon in their first stage. He would catch a parr with a few straggling scales upon it; he would look at this fish, and think it queer; instantly he would catch another, a little better covered with silver scales, but all loose, and not adhering to the body. Again, he would catch a smolt, manifestly a smolt, all covered with the white silver scales, yet still rather loose upon the skin, which would come off in his hand. Removing these scales, he found the parr with the blue finger‐marks below them, and that the fish were young salmon then became as manifest to the shepherd as that a lamb, if suffered to live, would become a sheep. Wondering at this, he marked a great number of the lesser fish, and offered rewards (characteristically enough, of whisky) to the peasantry to bring him such as had evidently undergone the change predicted by him. When this conclusion was settled in his mind, the Shepherd at once proclaimed his new‐gained knowledge. ‘What will the fishermen of Scotland think’ said he, ‘when I assure them, on the faith of long experience and observation, and on the word of one who can have no interest in instilling an untruth into their minds, that every insignificant parr with which the cockney fisher fills his basket is a salmon lost!’ These crude attempts of the impulsive Shepherd of Ettrick—and he was hotly opposed by the late Mr. Buist, of Stormontfield—were not without their fruits; indeed, they were so successful as quite to convince him that parr were young salmon in their first stage.”