RIVERS AND FACTORIES.
One of the dangers of the wholly excellent movement of factories into the country is the pollution of the rivers, as well as of the view. Unfortunate fishers of coarse fish (whose numbers after all vastly exceed the fly fishers), saw their roach, chub, and even pike, killed wholesale by unfortunate accidents in the effluent of sugar factories, and salmon and trout were killed by relics of gas factories in the West. Many sorts of factories have poisonous products to discharge, and, it may be, also mechanical refuse that is as fatal to spawning as chemical poisons. This may be seen along one of the loveliest wilder regions within Britain—the river valleys between the Devil's Bridge (where the wild Welsh yellow poppy still grows) and Aberystwyth (where the ravens breed). The coarse fishermen's season ended this week, and they look forward with some apprehension to the next. They need not, I think. Incidentally, it happens that the present Minister of Agri- culture has a peculiar zeal for pike-fishing ; and he knows that recently his Eastern Counties farmers were saved by sugar-beet, the alleged enemy of the pike. But the two can be made to exist si4e by side.
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