This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ...taken on the water was marked with more or less severe gashes and tooth marks, and in all the rivers on the northeast coast fish showing wounds from that cause are not uncommon. But the net fisher in the river itself is an even more deadly foe to the spring and early summer fish, for those are the slow-running fish, dawdling in the tideway and in the lower reaches, and the nets, where they are numerous, mop up the majority of such fish. It is quite certain that in many rivers which are not great 'spring' rivers, only a small proportion of the fish which spawn in them in winter come in at all as spring fish during the course of their lives. Such as do run in spring are the very best fish of the whole lot, the best in condition and the boldest and strongest fighters of the whole year, yet we do our very utmost to kill them out by allowing netting which is practically continuous, in the lower reaches of the rivers. For the small weekly close time is not enough to let the slowly running spring fish get past all the netting stations. Those fish which habitually come into the rivers in September or later escape the river nets altogether, but we steadily do our best to eliminate all the fish which have the habit of running in spring or summer. Just consider how slowly these fish run and how they are exposed to the dangers of the nets in the lower reaches of a river. In the close time before the season of 1897 began, one hundred and fifty clean spring fish were marked in the river Spey. Of these sixty-seven were retaken after the season opened; thirty-four of them had moved up the river, twenty-five had dropped down, and eight were recaptured at or about the places at which they had been marked. In most rivers, at any rate, I do not think that...