408 OYSTERS, AND ALL ABOUT THEM. 



fisheries established under Orders, the answers given to 

 the question relating to the amount of spat which has 

 fallen in different years were in many cases misleading. 

 Information was asked, not merely as to the number of 

 average or exceptionally good seasons, but also as to the 

 years in which a small quantity only has fallen. When, 

 therefore, a single year is mentioned in the answer, the 

 suggestion is that in no other year has spat adhered, or at 

 least survived. This, however, I do not find to be com- 

 monly the fact. At Swansea, where spat is said to have 

 fallen only in 1858, at Lynn, where 1868 alone is men- 

 tioned, and in the Emsworth Channel, where 1871 only is 

 specified in the answers of the two companies who have 

 fisheries there, more or less spat undoubtedly falls and sur- 

 vives in every year ; and at Bosham the small number of 

 oysters which the channel contains seem to be of every 

 age. On the other hand, the return from Edinburgh is 

 misleading in the contrary direction. Spat has fallen, in 

 the years mentioned in the answer, in fairly stocked parts 

 of the private grounds of the Corporation ; but, in the 

 exhausted beds held by it under the Order, as in the other 

 fisheries in the Forth established by Orders, all of which 

 are also exhausted, there is no reason for supposing that 

 any spat survives in most years. Taking as a whole the 

 fisheries which I have inspected, their present condition 

 and their history would seem to point to the conclusion 

 that spat falls every season in greater or less quantity, but 

 always appreciably, until beds are reduced to a certain 

 point of exhaustion ; but that when that point is once 

 passed, reproduction becomes at best doubtful. It may be 

 observed that in private grounds, in which, as a rule, more 

 oysters exist than in fisheries established under Orders, the 

 returns sent last spring to the Board of Trade show that in 



