In our own land, the Tweed, Tay, Spey, and Severn, are all noted rivers for salmon; the Tay fish sometimes weigh sixty pounds. It is a curious fact that the full‐grown salmon never feeds in the rivers. “Juvenile experience on the part of the fish, recurring as a phantasm, causes them to snap at a shining artificial minnow or a gaudy fly, but they never rise out of the water; the bait must dip to them, and when hooked they shake the intruder as a terrier does a rat.” Their superabundant store of fat enables them to live on themselves, as it were, as do the Asiatic and African doomba sheep when avalanches and heavy snow‐falls stop their supplies of herbage.(45) They become much thinner during their stay in fresh water; their colour becomes duller, and their flavour much depreciated. Izaak Walton’s statement that “the further they get from the sea they be both fatter and better” is utterly erroneous, for they fatten only in the sea. In March, 1845, the Duke of Athole took a ten‐pound salmon in the Tay after it had spawned, and attached a medal to it and then let it go to sea. The same individual, with its decoration, was fished up five weeks and a few days afterwards, when it had been to the refreshing salt water. It had more than doubled its weight, for it weighed twenty‐one pounds. [Illustration: THE SALMON (_Salmo salar_).] CHAPTER XV. OCEAN LIFE.—THE HARVEST OF THE SEA (_concluded_). The _Clupedæ_—The Herring—Its Cabalistic Marks—A Warning to Royalty—The “Great Fishery”—Modes of Fishing—A Night with the Wick Fishermen—Suicidal Fish—The Value of Deep‐sea Fisheries—Report of the Commissioners—Fecundity of the Herring—No fear of Fish Famine—The Shad—The Sprat—The Cornish Pilchard Fisheries—The “Huer”—Raising the “Tuck”—A Grand Harvest—Gigantic Holibut—Newfoundland Cod Fisheries—Brutalities of Tunny Fishing—The Mackerel—Its Courage, and Love of Man—Garum Sauce—The formidable Sword‐fish—Fishing by Torchlight—Sword through a Ship’s side—General Remarks on Fish—Fish Life—Conversation—Musical Fish—Pleasures and Excitements—Do Fish sleep? A great and important group of the bony fish is comprised under the family name _Clupedæ_. It includes such useful fish as the herring, pilchard, shad, and anchovy. The family is as interesting to the merchant as to the gastronomist.