422 Professor D'Arcy W. Thompson [March 22, 



the North Sea, we find that England, in spite of the distant voyages 

 that some of her trawlers make, and in spite of the considerable 

 fisheries of her western and southern coasts, still takes two-thirds of 

 her whole fish supply from that great fishing ground, the North Sea. 

 Scotland takes an even greater part, more tlian four-fifths of the 

 whole, and Holland, whose herring fishers go as far as Shetland, does 

 not go beyond, and takes practically the whole of her fish from the 

 North Sea area. Germany, on the other hand, takes only half her 

 supply from the North Sea, the rest coming from the Baltic, and in 

 part from her Iceland and other deep-sea trawlers. Denmark, again, 

 gets the bulk of her supply from her Baltic coasts ; and Norway, 

 whose greatest fisheries lie far north upon her Atlantic shores, takes 

 only one-fifth of her total catch from the North Sea. 



Numberless methods are employed for the capture of fish, number- 

 less modifications of bait and trap, of net and line ; but for our pur- 

 poses we may speak i3articularly of three only, the methods of the 

 line-fisher, the fisher of nets, and the trawl fisherman. In each one 

 of these methods great changes have taken place within recent 

 memory, changes that have revolutionized the industry and brought 

 far-reaching consequences to the lives and prosperity of the fisher- 

 men. 



Eighty years ago there was not a single first-class fisliing-boat, not 

 a single fishing-boat over 30 ft. long, in Scotland. Thirty years ago 

 there were more than 5000 such, and our Board in its first Report 

 said, even then, that there had been a revolution in the industry. 

 But another and a greater revolution had yet to follow, for trawling 

 was then in its infancy, and steam had scarce begun to oust the 

 sailing boat. We have now in England some 1800 steam trawlers, in 

 Scotland about 800, and about 400 more in the rest of northern 

 Europe. Besides this, we have in Scotland about 1100 steam 

 fishing-boats other than trawlers — mostly herring-drifters, whose 

 value is about 2-i millions of money ; England has between 500 and 

 GOO of these, and the rest of northern Europe at the last statistics 

 about 150. 



Steam and ice and railway facilities have done, in the last genera- 

 tion, for tlie fisheries what steam had done for the spindle and the 

 loom : to the immense advantage of the people at large, and with the 

 ine\itable accompaniment of loss to some. But in the case of the 

 fisheries, the loss and hardship have been tempered and attenuated 

 by the fact that the great herring industry has, in great measure, 

 escaped the tendency to concentration, both in regard to locality and 

 in regard to capitalization. Even the large steam-drifters, costing 

 over 2000/. a-piece, are, to a very large extent, the property of the 

 fishermen themselves. The fishermen remain free men ; they are 

 independent, industrious, and prosperous ; and, speaking at least for 

 Scotland, though there are fewer fishermen than there were forty 



