DESTRUCTION OF HERRINGS. 5H7 



from the western boundary of the United States. The question of the protection of the Herring 

 is not likely soon to come up in our legislatures. It has, however, for many years been deeply 

 agitated iu Europe, and in Great Britain especially has occupied the attention of learned com- 

 missions for periods extending over many months. In isiji' and ISu'j special commissions were 

 engaged iu the investigation of the iullueuce of the trawl-net fishery, particularly with reference to 

 its connection with the herring fishery. And it is .a matter of cousidergble interest to be able to 

 quote in a few paragraphs the conclusions reached by Professor Huxley, who was a member of each 

 of these commissions, not because, as already suggested, the question of protecting the herring 

 fishery is likely to be agitated in the United States, but because the. same class of facts and the 

 same train of reasoning will apply with almost equal force to the problem of the protection of the 

 mackerel, menhaden, and other similar fisheries. He spoke as follows in 1881 iu the lecture already 

 referred to: 



"I do not believe that all the herring fleets taken together destroy five per cent, of the total 

 number of Herrings in the sea in any year, and I see no reason to swerve from the conviction my 

 colleagues and I expressed in our report, that their destructive operations are totally insignificant 

 when compared with those which, as a simple calculation shows, must regularly aud uorinally 

 go on. 



" Suppose that every mature female Herriug lays 10,000 eggs, that the fish are not interfered 

 with by man, and that their numbers remain approximately the same year after year, it follows 

 that 9,998 of the progeny of every female must be destroyed before they reach maturity. For, if 

 more, than two out of the 10,000 escape destruction, the number of Herrings will be proportion- 

 ately increased. Or, in other words, if the average strength of the shoals which visit a given 

 locality is to remain the same year by year, many thousand times the number contained in those 

 shoals must be annually destroyed. And how this enormous amount of destruction is effected 

 will be obvious to any one who cousiders the operations of the fin-whales, the porpoises, the 

 ganuets, the gulls, the codfish, and the dog-fish, which accompany the shoals aud perennially feast 

 upon them ; to say nothing of the flat-fish, which prey upon the newly-deposited spawn; or of the 

 mackerel and the innumerable smaller enemies which devour the fry iu all stages of their develop- 

 ment. It is no uncommon thing to find five or six nay, even ten or twelve Herrings iu the 

 stomach of a codfish, aud in 18C3 we calculated that the whole take of the great Scotch herring 

 fisheries is less than the number of Herrings which would in all probability have been consumed 

 by the codfish captured in the sume waters if they had been left in the sea. Man, in fact, is but 

 one of a vast co-operative society of herring catchers, aud the larger the share he takes the less 

 there is for the rest of the company. If man took none, the other shareholders would have a- 

 larger dividend, and would thrive and multiply in proportion, but it would come to pretty much 

 the same thing to the Herrings. 



"As long as the records of history give us information, Herrings appear to have abounded on 

 the east coast of the British Islands, and there is nothing to show, so far as I am aware, that, 

 taking an average of years, they were ever either more or less numerous than they are at present. 

 But, in remarkable contrast with this constancy, the shoals of Herrings have elsewhere exhibited 

 a strange capriciousness visiting a given locality for many years in great numbers, and then sud- 

 denly disappearing. Several well marked examples of this fickleness are recorded on the west 

 coast of Scotland; but the most remarkable is that furnished by the fisheries of Bohuslan, a 

 province which lies on the southwestern shore of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Here a variety 

 known as the 'old' or 'great' Herring, after being so extremely abundant, for about sixty years, 



