414 Professor D''Arcij W. Thompso7i [March 22 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, March 22, 1912. 



His Grace The Duke of Northumberland, K.G. P.C. D.C.L. 

 LL.D. F.R.S., in the Chair. 



Professor D'Arcy W. Thompson, C.B. M.A. 



The North Sea and its Fisheries. 



FoUR-SQUAEE the Nortli Sea lies, and its gates are three. To the 

 northward Hes the broad opening to the northern ocean, a freqnented 

 highway of the fisherman, where the sails of commerce are few. The 

 eastern gate is the wide channel of the Skagerack, that leads through 

 the narrow passes of the Belts and Cattegat to the great inland Baltic 

 Sea ; I like to think of it as an old road, a route of very ancient trade, 

 the old highway of the Hanse merchants, the road to Muscovy ! 

 And lastly, in the south-west, there is the narrow strait that widens 

 into the British Channel, tlie chief and busiest street of the modern 

 maritime world. Of these three gateways, two open to the ocean and 

 one to the inland sea, two to the salt waters and one to the brackish 

 or the fresh ; and herein, as we shall see presently, we have the 

 simple clue to much of the physics and not a little of the biology of 

 the North Sea. 



Sailing in imagination round the North Sea, we pass from the 

 rock-bound shores of northern Scotland, through all the varied scenery 

 of our eastern borders, to the dull levels of the Dutch and Frisian 

 coast, to a long line of low-lying shores, sandy or muddy, fringed 

 with low islands, where through islands and broken coast the great 

 rivers of central Europe find their outlet to the sea. Along the shores 

 of Jutland, low, level stretches of sand confront us, until, crossing the 

 Skagerack, we are again of a sudden in presence of rock and precipice. 

 Then onwards along the many hundred miles of Norwegian coast we 

 have more or less similar scenery of cliff and mountain, often glacier- 

 topped, and th'i broken barrier of islands, behind which the deep 

 fjords are sheltered from the Atlantic billows. 



Around this long coast-line the fishing population is universally 

 but une(|ually distributed. In the old days almost every sheltered 

 creek or sandy bay, where the boats could be drawn up in winter, re- 

 cei\ed its sparse settlement of fishermen, and their number, if in part 

 regulated by the nature of the coast, was still more governed by the 

 racial characteristics of the people : for some breeds of men are fisher- 

 men born, and some are not ; and some races, such as the Cornishmen, 

 the Dutchmen, and the Norsemen, were long pre-eminent, and the 



