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Southland Times, Issue 681, 10 June 1867, Page 2

AWeish Salmon Trap.— Visitors to Snowdon, who have sojourned at that romantic retreat Bettws-y-Coed, a favorite resort of tourists and landscape painters, are perhaps entirely ignorant of the ingenuity with which natnre is made subservient to art in providing their "first course" at the fable d'hote. The visiA of the special commissioners for inquiring into the legality of the fixed engines on the rivers of England and Wales threw some light on the process. At their sitting at Conway, the commissioners decided on a claim by John Jones, of Tanralt, to use a fishing basket at a certain spot on the river Sledr, at Bettws-y-Coed. The claimant is the owner of a small farm on the banks of the Sledr (a tributary of- the Conway), at a spot where the river falls over one of the picturesque water-falls of that remote district. At this point the river on Jones's side tumbles off a rock into a natural hollow or chasm and'thence by a smaller fall — about a yard — into a lower level. The fish, in ascending the river, easily jump up the lower fall into the natural basin above, but here they are stopped by a barrier only passable in high floods. The water running entirely through rock, is almost always clear, so that the salmon can be seen from above when lying in "the natural basin. John Jones, therefore, when ■ he " sees a fish between the two falls, first places a man on the top of the rock, holding by a rope a wide-mouthed basket which he rests against the outlet of the second fall, while ■with a long wand he tickles the snout of master salmon, who is vainly waiting to get highbf up the river, on which the affrighted fish immediately turns tail and rushes down stream head first into the basket, where lie is trapped. The trap, it was proved, had been used for generations by the same family, and so was certified by the comissioners. — " Chester Courant.'' . . Potato Disease. — Tlie " Eirerine Herald " is informed that ihc pofcatoe disease which has appeared among the Murray crops is precisely the same as that which prevailed in England in the year 1816.