508 SUPPLEMENT ON 



our wants, it is not surprising that its fishery should have 

 become a real and complicated art, with its laws and its pri- 

 vileges, that it should occupy an immense multitude of men, 

 and that every year entire fleets, in which as many as twenty 

 thousand sailors of a single nation have been employed, repair 

 to the northern latitudes for the sole purpose of catching, pre- 

 serving, and bringing back this fish to their respective 

 countries. Such expeditions are equally favourable to the 

 increase of subsistence, of commerce, of industry, of popula- 

 tion ; to the improvement of the naval power, of the general 

 strength, of the security and the happiness of nations. 



For a series of generations the annual destruction of these 

 fishes by man has been so prodigious, that, but for the im- 

 mense extent of the resources of re-production accorded to 

 it by nature, the species must have long since become ex- 

 tinct ; indeed, it is difficult to conceive how it has been pre- 

 served up to the present time, when we reflect that from 1368 

 the inhabitants of Amsterdam have carried on their fisheries 

 on the coasts of Sweden ; that in the first six months of the 

 year 1792, according to the report of the minister Roland to 

 the National Convention, there issued from the ports of 

 France, for the cod fishery alone, two hundred and ten ves- 

 sels, carrying altogether 191,153 tons ; that every year more 

 than six thousand vessels of all nations are occupied in this 

 fishery, and bring back more than 36,000,000 of cods, salted 

 or dried. To all this we may add the devastation carried on 

 among these fishes by the large squali and certain cetacea, 

 the destruction of a multitude of young individuals by the 

 other inhabitants of the water, and by sea fowl, the failure of 

 fecundation as to a great number of eggs, and the accidents 

 which happen to a great number of others. After all these 

 considerations the wonder would be that any of the species 

 remain, if we did not know that each mother can annually 

 give birth to above nine millions of young. 



