marked their sense of the excellence of those which were delicately fed by offering a double price for every one caught in a granary. Man directs his hostility against the rat, however, chiefly because he considers him a nuisance; and the gin and poison, cold iron and the bowl, a dismal alternative, are accordingly presented to him; with the former he is not so easily caught, and will never enter a trap or touch a gin in which any of his kind have fretted and rubbed. Poison is a more effectual method, but it is not always safe. Rats which have been beguiled into partaking of arsenic instantly make for the water to quench their intolerable thirst, and, though they usually withdraw from the house, they may resort in their agony to an in-door cistern, and remain there to pollute it. The writer who calls himself 'Uncle James,' and who, for a reason that will shortly appear, is exceedingly anxious to impress the public with the belief that the best mode of getting rid of the rat is to hunt him with terriers, states that a dairy-farmer in Limerick poisoned his calves and pigs by giving them the skim-milk at which rats had drunk when under the pangs produced by arsenic. One mode of clearing them out of a house is either to singe the hair of a devoted rat, or else to dip his hind-quarters into tar, and then turn him loose, when the whole community will take their leave for a while; but this is only a temporary expedient, and in the interim the offenders are left to multiply, and perchance transfer their ravages to another part of the domain where they are equally mischievous. The same objection applies to the remedy of pounding the common dog's-tongue, when gathered in full sap, and laying it in their haunts. They retire only to return. The Germans turn the rat himself into a police-officer to warn off his burglarious brethren. Dr. Shaw, in his General Zoology, states that a gentleman who travelled through Mecklenburg about thirty years ago saw one at a post-house with a bell about its neck, which the landlord assured him had frightened away the whole of the whiskered vermin' which previously infested the place. Mr. Neele says that at Bangkok, the Siamese capital, the people are in the habit of keeping tame rats, which walk about the room, and crawl up the legs of the inmates, who pet them as they would a dog. They are caught young, and, attaining a monstrous size by good feeding, take the place of our cats, and entirely free the house of

A

* A single dead rat beneath a floor will render a room uninhabitable. financier of European celebrity found his drawingroom intolerable. He supposed that the drains were out of order, and went to a great expense to remedy the evil. The annoyance continued, and a rat-catcher guessed the cause of the mischief. On pulling up the boards a dead rat was discovered near the bell-wire. The bell had been rung as he was passing, and the crank had caught and strangled

him.

their own kind. But the most effectual and in the end the cheapest remedy is an expert rat-catcher. Cunning as an experienced old rat becomes, he is invariably checkmated when man fairly tries a game of skill with him. The well-trained professor of the art, who by long habit has grown familiar with his adversary's haunts and tactics, his hopes and fears, his partialities and antipathies, will clear out a house or a farmyard, where a novice would merely catch a few unwary adventurers and put the rest upon their guard. The majority of the world have, happily for themselves, a better office, and the regular practitioner might justly address the amateur in much the same words that the musician employed to Frederick the Great, when the royal fluteplayer was expecting to be complimented on his performance: It would be a discredit to your Majesty to play as well as I.'

Uncle James,' however, is of a different opinion. This author considers that every man should be his own rat-catcher, which he evidently believes to be the most improving, dignified, and fascinating calling under the sun, as he considers rats themselves to be the crying evil of the day, second only in his estimation to the grand injustice of the old corn-law. Indeed we cannot see from his own premises how the evil can be second to any great destructive principle, earthquakes included. He takes a single pair of rats, and proves satisfactorily that in three years, if undisturbed, they will have thirteen litters of eight each at a birth, and that the young will begin littering again when six months old; by this calculation he increases the original pair at the end of three years to six hundred and fifty-six thousand eight hundred and eight. Calculating that ten rats eat as much in one day as a man, which we think is rather under than over the fact, the consumption of these rats would be equal to that of sixty-four thousand six hundred and eight men the year round, and leave eight rats in the year to spare.' Now, if a couple of rats could occasion such devastation in three years after the original pair marched out of the ark, how comes it that the descendants of the myriads which ages ago co-existed among us have not eaten up the earth and the fullness thereof? Uncle James conveniently forgets that animals do not multiply according to arithmetical progression, but simply in proportion to the food provided for them. He must not however be expected to be wiser than Malthus on the subject of animal reproduction, and he has the additional incentive to error, that he evidently paints up his horrors for an artful purpose. There can be no sort of doubt that he has several well-bred terriers to dispose of, and hence the following panacea for all the evils which afflict society.

'A dog, to be of sound service, ought to be of six to thirteen pounds weight;

weight; over that they become too unwieldy. I would also recommend above all others the London rat-killing terrier: he is as hard as steel, courageous as a lion, and as handsome as a racehorse! [Uncle James is a Londoner of course.] Let the farmers in each parish meet and pass resolutions calling upon their representatives in parliament to take the tax off rat-killing dogs. Let them devise plans for procuring some well-bred terriers and ferrets, and spread the young ones about among their men. Let there be a reward offered of so much per head for dead rats, and let there be one person in each parish appointed to pay for the same. Rats are valuable for manure; let there be a pit in each locality, and let this man stick up an announcement every week, in some conspicuous place, as to the number of rats killed, and by whom. Then, what will be the result? Why, a spirit of emulation will rise up among the villagers, and they will be ransacking every hole and corner for rats. Thus will a tone of cheerful enterprise, activity, and pleasantry come in among them, "with a fund of conversation;" and instead of that crawling, dogged monotony which characterises their general gait and manner, they will meet their employers and go to their labour with joyous steps and smiling countenances.'

The coming man, so long expected, is it seems the rat-catcher. Here is manure multiplied, agriculture improved, food husbanded, a smiling, enlightened, and conversible peasantry-and all the result of rat-catching. But a But a difficulty has been overlooked. When the entire population is converted into rat-catchers, rats must shortly, like the dodo, be extinct. For a while we shall become an exporting country, but this resource must fail us at last, and England's glory will expire with its rats. Then once more we shall have a sullen, silent, discontented peasantry; 'their fund of conversation' will be exhausted, or at best the villagers will be reduced to talk with a sigh of the golden age, never to be renewed, when the country enjoyed the unspeakable blessing of rat-catching. In short, we fear that Uncle James has been so exclusively devoted to the science of rat-catching, that he has neglected to cultivate the inferior art of reasoning, but, interested as we suspect it to be, we join in his commendation of the virtues of the terrier. The expedition with which a clever dog will put his victims out of their misery is such that a terrier not four pounds in weight has killed four hundred rats within two hours. By this we may estimate the destruction dealt to the race by that nimble animal, hard as steel, courageous as a lion, and handsome as a race-horse.' A custom has sprung up within the last twenty years of watching these dogs worry rats in a pit, and there are private arenas of the kind where our fair country women, leaning over the cushioned circle, will witness with admiration the cleverness of their husbands' or brothers'

terriers.

terriers. Uncle James' might commend their taste, and think the sport calculated to furnish them with a fund of conversation, and a spirit of cheerful enterprise and pleasantry;' but except the fact had proved it to be otherwise, we should have supposed that there was not an educated man in Great Britain who would not kave been shocked at this novel propensity of English ladies.

ART. V.—1. Encyclopædia Britannica. New Edition.—Art. Fisheries.

2. Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for December.-Report by Sir William Jardine, Bart., on the Experiments in Artificial Breeding at Stormontfield.

3. Tweed Fisheries Act-11th George IV., cap. 54.

4. Abstracts of Bills for Enlarging and Amending the Tweed Fisheries Act, to be introduced into Parliament in the Session of 1857.

5. The Salmon Fishings in the River Tweed. By Robert Weddel, Esq. (Printed by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastleupon-Tyne.)

WE

THEN the patriotic Fluellen, in his eagerness to establish a parallel between Henry of Agincourt and Alexander the pig,' not content with alleging that there was a river in Macedon, and also moreover' a river in Monmouth, ventured to add that there were 'salmons in both,' he not only belied the excellent testimonial he had given to his own character as 'a goot man in all particularities,' but did injustice to the rarity of a privilege intrusted, not altogether worthily, to the now United Kingdom. For he was entirely wrong in the particularity' of there ever having been 'salmons' in the rivers of Macedon, or indeed in any of the waters that feed the Mediterranean-a deprivation all the harder upon the natives of those regions that the Macedonians centuries ago practised the art of angling, being apparently one of the few communities that borrowed that important portion of civilization from the Egyptians, who were the first and perhaps for many ages the only people that cast angles into the brook. Upon very few nations has the gift of the king of fish been conferred; and we have so abused or neglected it that soon the parallel between Monmouth and Macedon may become a fact by there being salmons' in neither. When Alexander, leaving salmonless Macedonia behind, led the way to the far East, he was unconsciously going in the wrong direction, for there are no salmons in the Ganges either, and his 'royal feast

·

for

for Persia won' was wretchedly deficient in a dish considered indispensable at even the humblest of our own 'Crimean banquets. More wise and fortunate was Cæsar, who turned his attention to Gaul and Britain, and whose soldiers had no sooner reached the banks of the Garonne than the saltatory motions of the salmon cleaving his joyous way through the fresh water, after his sojourn in the ocean, excited their admiration and appetite, and procured for him the generic name which has since stuck to him, and to which, though by reason of persecution greatly distressed both in body and mind, he still labours to do justice. But although rumours of the delicacy of the salmon reached the Romans like a sweet-smelling savour, and a demand for the article instantly sprang up among that luxurious people, supply for once did not follow demand, because the Alps intervened, and because the secret of packing in ice was only discovered by a Scotch laird, called Dempster of Dunnichen, about 1870 years too late for the Roman market. In brief, the salmon was designed by nature only for the favoured people of the north and west, and in an especial measure for our own ungrateful land.

Putting together all the evidence that has come down to us in history, poetry, and antique laws, the conclusion is that the three kingdoms, but more especially Scotland, have from the beginning been pre-eminently the kingdoms of the salmon. In old times we obviously had a great comparative superiority over our neighbours, and though we are now undergoing an alarming decay, our comparative superiority is greater than ever, some nations having decayed much faster than ourselves, and others having reached that extinction to which we are only hastening. It is clear that, from Scotland at least, there was in old times a large export of salmon (chiefly salted), many curious proofs of the fact being found among the old Scottish statutes; and it seems almost equally clear that England also had an over-abundant supply, except in those districts far removed from the fisheries. If we do not now furnish foreign markets, it is not because there is no demand, but because we have not enough even as a costly luxury for ourselves, although during the Paris Exhibition of 1853 we did contrive to send the sight-seers large consignments of the foulest and most unwholesome fish. Yet Great Britain has become more than ever the salmon producing country of the world; and when the fish ceases from among us, the end of all salmon is at hand. True, we are told by Sir John Ross that the production of salmon in the Arctic regions is so great, that in Boothia Felix a ton can be bought for a knife (knives are scarce), and that they are eaten to such an extent, that he saw an Esquimaux dispose of a stone weight to lunch, before beginning

to