While tlie fish are thus souglit for, and destroyed
at the mouths of tlie rivers, with ever-increasing-
avidity, inspired by decrease of the commodity)

e of the
work in the upper paits of the river where the
salmon breed, which diminish the production of
the fish, in a degree more tlian corresponding with
the destruction of the full-grown fiah beneath.
Two of these causes are in full und active opera-
tion, threatening, in process of no distant lime, the
total destruction of the fish in all the southern sal-
mon-rivers in Scotland.
One of these causes of destruction is the general
system of drainage practised upon all the high pas-
ture lands of the mountain farms, in a degree
nidieard of in any former period, and which lias
produced, and is daily producing, the moat com-
plete change on the brooks and rivers which,
twenty years since, were fed from morasses that
are now dry pasture. Malieus alludes to tliis, in.
