10 OYSTERS, AND ALL ABOUT THEM. 



But in addition to the reasons stated for my under- 

 taking this work, I respectfully venture to emphasize the 

 relative inducements culminating in the present volume, 

 and its hoped-for instructive, entertaining, and referential 

 utility to the reading public, by quoting the strictures upon 

 this point of my subject of a vigorous writer in the Quar- 

 terly Review (vol. 144), who, criticising some "Reports on 

 Oyster Fisheries," says : 



" One cause which has tended to the spoliation of the 

 shoals is the ignorance which has prevailed, and still 

 prevails, of the natural and economic history of fish and 

 crustaceans. Beyond the fact already alluded to of their 

 enormous fecundity, we know almost nothing about them. 

 Fishes and crustaceans have been classified in families or 

 groups, and many of them have been carefully described, 

 and most of them figured and coloured with more or less 

 care. But what, let us ask, is known of their habits of 

 life, their rates of growth, and the age at which they 

 become reproductive. We know very little, indeed, of 

 those features of their lives about which we should know 



most It is from want of such knowledge that 



the public now suffer. The decreasing supplies of lobsters, 

 crabs, and oysters, as well as the marked falling off now 

 apparent in our supplies of both flat and round fish, 

 may be set down to that mal-economy which is born of 

 ignorance and cupidity. What does it matter, for example, 

 to the consumer whether an oyster yields spat sufficient for 

 the production of five hundred or five thousand of its kind, 

 if he does not obtain a share of them? The natural waste 

 of fish-life and this is a fact that has been too much 

 ignored is commensurate with the spawning power 



bestowed upon them As regards the natural 



history of the oyster, it is curious that although it is an 



