OUR FISHERIES 73 



man might devise other engines wherewith to pursue the 

 mackerel shoals even to the farthest limits of their wanderings. 

 Were this successfully contrived, the shoals would not have 

 the two or three months of respite which they now enjoy. 

 They would, in fact, be brought under the same conditions 

 as the plaice. At no time of its life, at any rate after leaving 

 the egg, is that flat-fish secure from man. At no stage — larval, 

 post-larval, or adult — does it find an asylum for ever so brief 

 a portion of the year outside of the zone fished by man. The 

 undeveloped forms are destroyed in the shrimp-trawl ; the 

 undersized and immature fish are killed in the stake-nets ; 

 the trawl destroys it at all ages, both fit and unfit for sale. 



The mackerel may therefore, particularly in our present 

 uncertainty as to its wanderings, be regarded as a practically 

 inexhaustible fish. Its only natural habit which strongly pre- 

 judices its survival in numbers is that of gathering and moving 

 in immense shoals, which naturally form a more vulnerable 

 object of any fishery than if the fish were to roam singly or 

 in small bands. All round-fish fall more or less under this 

 same condition ; but in the case of those, like the dory, which 

 which do not congregate in such conspicuous shoals, there is 

 even less cause for apprehension. 



By those who regard the gloomy view of our fisheries as 

 unwarranted by the facts, it is often urged that man and his 

 engines are powerless to make any impression on the hordes 

 of fish in the ocean. That, of course, is perfectly true. The 

 whales and sharks that still prowl through the oceans, the huge 

 fish-eating lizards, long since extinct, must among them often 

 have consumed more fish in a day than man's paltry trawls 

 account for in a year. Yet the exhaustion of the ocean is 

 hardly the practical problem. Every year the machinery of 

 transport in ice is improving, yet there will always be remote 

 parts of the ocean from which fish, however plentiful, cannot 

 be profitably brought to market. When mankind reaches that 

 limit — if he ever does — then the fisheries may finally, so far as 



