SALMON AND OYSTERS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IV, Issue 61, 15 March 1869, Page 3

SALMON AND OYSTERS.

Mr Frank Buckland,M.A., Inspector of Fisheries, lately delivered a lecture on "The Cultivation of the Salmon aud Oyster by Natural and Artificial Means," to a "large audience, at the Midland Institute. The product of the Scotch, Irish, Dutch, Norwegian and Welsh fisheries for salmon alone in 1863 was £195,480; iv 1864, £188,940; and in 1865 the value of the salmon caught in England, Ireland, and Scotland was £177,560, or nearly £200,000 a year ; but it was necessary before they could get these great results to study the natural history of the fish. The salmon was persecuted, and treated more like vermin than as the most useful creature we could possibly have. The moment one was seen it was hunted and killed. It was a sea fish properly, whose business it was to go up into the mountains far inland. It would come to our very doors, aud man in his ignorance and folly said it should not. Another cause of salmon destruction was the great pollution of our rivers, although there was no reason why Englishmen should allow the rivers which nature had given them pure aud wholesome to become sewers. The number of eggs a salmon deposited was something enormous, and if they were to come to life aud maturity, they would be worth £l each. If an old salmon got up carry iug 20,000 eggs, and 10,000 fish came down out of these, perhaps 5,000 would return if they could (he did not say they would), and by preserving one fish of that kind they might get 5,000 worth a pound each. He calculated that every nest a salmon laid was worth £5 to the proprietor of a fishery. In conclusion, the lecturer briefly alluded to the oyster, which he considered of very near as much value as the salmon. He explained briefly the best means of cultivating oysters, and exhibited them in all the stages of their growth. The least cold aifectiug the youug oyster was the great cause of their failure. They wanted a temperature of between seventy and eighty degrees to give them life and enable them to take a hold on the substauces to which they cling. He explaiued many peculiarities relating to them, and asked his audience to become converts to the salmon and oyster cause, in which case he promised to come and address them again on a future day.