our naturalists (from want of opportunity, we presume) have told us so little about these inhabitants of the great world of water—especially as regards the question of growth—that we must cease to wonder at the learned wrangling which has taken place, the ignorance of the subject betrayed by people of considerable learning, or the length of time many of the controversies have lasted.
The disputes connected with the fishes of the salmon family have, for instance, been raging for about a century and a half. Parr, smelt, grilse, and salmon have each in turn supplied a theme for discussion, and as Salmo Salar is the acknowledged King of Fishes—the venison of the waters, as the great stag is the monarch of the British forests—it will be only a grateful concession to the throne to consider first what has been said about his birth, breeding, and growth, as his biography is far from being uneventful.
Between its cradle and its grave, a period averaging four years, the salmon undergoes no end of adventure. It is usually born in the rippling waters of some tributary to a large river. The parent fish in the early winter-time plough up the gravel with their snouts and tails till a suitable trench for the deposition of their spawn is formed. The eggs, being duly deposited by the female fish and fructified by the milter, are left to their fate; and whether the river foam in flood, or be frozen over, or dried up at its source, the eggs remain. But they are not hatched in forty-eight hours, as was once asserted by a wise salesman of Billingsgate! nor even in twice forty-eight days are they certain to be in life. The sharp winds of February must toss about the water, and the suns of March and April require to light up the river, before the eggs come to maturity, and the young fish bursts from its fragile prison. A very small number of salmon eggs are hatched, so that the quantity deposited is usually out of all proportion to the fish which are born; the percentage of loss being enormous. It was long a disputed point with naturalists how fish eggs were rendered fruitful; and notwithstanding what has been so well demonstrated at the Stormontfield breeding-ponds, some folks will not believe that the fructification of salmon or other ova is a purely external act.
One of the most prolonged controversies about fish-growth, has been in connection with the infant salmon: it is known as the parr controversy, and has been carried on for a great number of years by a succession of clever disputants. The young of Salmo Salar are best known as parr, although on some rivers they are called samlets, salmon-fry, branlin, fingerling, &c. The dispute regarding the parr arose from its being set down by naturalists as a distinct animal, perfect and complete in itself, and not the young of any other fish. This delusion lasted for a century, till at last there arose infidels and heretics, observing men, looking and thinking for themselves, who came to the conclusion that parr were salmon in their most infantile stage. This was at once set down by the naturalists of the old school as “flat blasphemy;” but the idea moved for all that, as did the earth in the time of Galileo. Proof was demanded, and in good time proof was forthcoming—and, strange to say, Mr. Robert Buist, the conservator of the river Tay, and the moving spirit of the Stormontfield salmon-breeding experiments, who has recently witnessed over and over again the transformation of the parr into salmon, was the Pope of the old school, whose one fixed idea was that parr were parr, and parr only. He was encountered in those days by the Ettrick Shepherd, one of the very earliest to doubt “the distinct fish” theory. Hogg, while wandering about in the quiet pastoral districts of the South of Scotland, saw, as he tells us in one of his egotistical essays, “the bits o’ things changing their skin before his ain twa e’en;” he saw the finger’d bars of the parr melt away only to reveal the silver scales of the smelt; and seeing this year after year, he became perfectly certain that parr were young salmon. How to convince the old sceptics of this fact was the great difficulty with Hogg. However, as he used to say, “necessity is the mother of invention;” and from necessity he invented a plan of marking the fish, and in the country smithies he advertised his plan, described his marks, and offered handsome rewards, in the shape of gills of whisky, to all who would bring him the fish he had marked in their next stage of growth. By this plan he procured abundant proof of the correctness of his theory; but the naturalists were still sceptical. “No doubt,” said they, “this smelt is the young of the salmon, but then it is the young salmon you have marked, and not the true parr.” Hogg was quite convinced himself of the thoroughness of his experiments, but as for “they asses of naturalists,” as he called the savans who took part with him in the dispute, “there is no convincing them except by mathematics, an’ ye canna mak’ diagrams and figures out o’ the parr question.”
Although the Shepherd of Ettrick died without making a great many converts to what was called by scientific people his “mad theory,” yet he left a disciple who carried out his ideas and proved his case. Mr. Shaw, forester to the Duke of Buccleuch at Drumlanrig, the re-discoverer of pisciculture, was determined to have the question set at rest; and in order that there might be no doubt about his facts, he commenced by gathering the eggs of the salmon from the spawning beds and placing them in water where they could be hatched under his own eye. These eggs in due season quickened into life, and as duly in process of time they became salmon, changing from the parr to the smelt state, and in Mr. Shaw’s opinion his experiment was triumphant. “Oh dear, no,” said the old theorists, “you have proved nothing; the whole process is a mistake; you have not obtained the eggs of the real parr at all; it is salmon eggs you have taken, and there is no merit in growing salmon from their own eggs.”
Mr. Shaw’s enthusiasm was a little cooled, no doubt, by this attempt to put him down; but, by and by, he returned to his experiments with renewed vigour, and speedily carried out a plan which was destined to settle peremptorily one phase of the parr question. He caught the male and female fish, and depriving them of their