INTRODUCTORY. 45 



for a good deal of what is spoken of as small fish has 

 some value, and finds purchasers, although at a low 

 price. It would be better if they were not caught 

 until larger, and the trawlers would willingly do 

 without them, but they cannot help themselves. Fish 

 of all sizes find their way into the net, and a moderate- 

 sized sole will wriggle through a mesh that one might 

 suppose would be much too small to allow it to pass ; 

 while very small soles are often unable to escape 

 through meshes wliich are abundantly large for them^ 

 because they have not strength to open a passage 

 through them when they are strained so much as to 

 become closed ; or they may be crowded with other fish 

 in the pockets. We do not know how many escape at 

 present ; but the use of a larger mesh would certainly 

 ensure the loss of a great many fair-sized fish which 

 now are captured ; and, for the reasons we have men- 

 tioned, more of the small ones would not necessarily 

 escape. 



There is no method of fishing which does not involve 

 waste in some form, either by killing immature fish or 

 destroying spawn in the adult. Even if we look at the 

 salmon fishery, hedged about as it is by enactments, 

 good, bad, or indifferent, according to the various 

 opinions of the persons directly interested in its pros- 

 perity, we find the same thing going on ; and we 

 venture to think there are many people who now sigh 

 over the capture of a two-pound codling which might 

 have become a ten-pound cod, perhaps in a couple of 

 years, but who would not hesitate to basket a three- 

 pound grilse, although with two years' grace it would 

 probably have become a twenty-pound salmon, if not 

 more. If salmon, like herrings, were considered in 

 their prime when just ready to spawn, very much 



