18971 NOTES AND COMMENTS 229 



Lobster Fishery 



Me -I ames Hoknell has contributed two long letters to the Jersey 

 Times and the Jersey Evening Post relative to the Lobster 

 Fishery of the ' Channel Islands. There is a marked and general 

 decrease in the size of the catches, and some arrangements are 

 needful for regulating and preserving the supply. Mr Hornell is 

 of the opinion that the geographical position of the Channel Islands 

 precludes — in view of the powerful currents sweeping their coasts — 

 any useful purpose being served by the hatching and liberation of 

 fry, wherever fry are surface swimmers for any considerable length 

 of time. He does not forget in his argument that the currents 

 may reverse their direction at regular times, but urges the import- 

 ance of a detailed and exact investigation of current action around 

 the islands before costly means are undertaken for stocking pur- 

 poses. And at the same time he casts doubts from his own obser- 

 vation on the accepted idea that the young lobster is a pelagic 

 animal, because he has found that in some experiments he has made 

 that while he lost most of the fry by the surface pipe of his 

 aquarium, those of the age of three days seemed inclined to sink 

 to the bottom and abandon a surface life. Again, Mr Hornell has 

 never once taken lobster fry in his almost continuous towings with 

 fine muslin nets on the south coast of Jersey, while the fry of 

 crabs, prawns, and Squilla occur in countless thousands. His 

 method for the improvement and protection of the Lobster Fishery 

 would be to rigidly enforce the protection of the berried female 

 and all lobsters under nine inches, rather than to commence a 

 nursery, both costly and difficult to manage. At the same time, if 

 experiment were to prove the non-pelagic nature of the fry, then 

 culture and liberation might be useful, in addition to the protective 

 regulations referred to above. 



'o* 



Pre-Cambrian (?) Radiolaria in Australia 



Prof. Edgeworth David and Mr Walter Howchin announce in the 

 Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, pt. 4, 1896, 

 the discovery of Ptadiolaria in rocks of supposed Pre-Cambrian age 

 in the neighbourhood of Hallett's Cove, about fifteen miles S.S.W. 

 from Adelaide. The fossils occur in a dark, greenish-grey silicious 

 limestone, and in a fine-grained laminated grey clay-shale, but they 

 are very obscure and badly preserved. 



Although no other fossils have been found at Brighton and 

 Crystal Brook in the rocks in which the Padiolaria occur, there is a 

 rich and abundant fauna in the Cambrian series of the district ; but 



