140 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 
appliances, and the canning processes. The manner of preparing 
cod roe as bait for use in the sardine fishery was fully considered, as 
a remunerative trade can doubtless be developed in this commodity 
between the United States and France. These inquiries were greatly 
facilitated by Mr. Emile Deyrolle-Guillou, to whom special acknowl- 
edgments are due for numerous courtesies. A special report on the 
french sardine industry has been submitted, and will shortly be 
issued. Some attention was also given to the sardine (i. e., pilehard) 
fishery in Cornwall, England, and the limited canning of sardines at 
Mevagissey in that county. 
The downward tendency of the United States lobster fishery and 
the special investigations addressed to the lobster which the Commis- 
sion has been conducting for several years, made it quite desirable 
that the actual condition of the lobster fisheries of other countries 
should be determined, together with the measures which have been 
adopted abroad for protecting the lobster and promoting the fishery. 
Accordingly, at various places in England, Scotland, and France, vis- 
ited in connection with the foregoing inquiries, data on this subject 
were obtained by personal inspection, and information in regard to 
several other-countries was secured from government officials and 
others met at the fishery congress at Paris. The history of the lobster 
fisheries of the different European countries is of decided importance 
for comparison with that of our own lobster industry. 
One current feature of the lobster fisheries of England and France— 
the most important in Kurope—is of special interest as showing the 
interrelation of aquatic animals and man’s possible influence thereon. 
Owing, in part at least, to the active fishery for the conger eel, this 
fish has become comparatively uncommon in lobster-fishing regions, 
where it was formerly very abundant. This is especially the case 
on the southern coast of England and west coast of France. At the 
same time these coasts have been visited by enormous numbers of octo- 
pus, which have proved very disastrous to the lobster fishery, reduc- 
ing the number of lobsters on the fishing-grounds and also entering 
the fishermen’s traps and destroying the lobsters after they have been 
_-caught, so that in some important districts the lobster fishery has 
been rendered a total failure. The conger eel is perhaps the most 
potent natural enemy of the octopus, and according to a widespread 
and apparently well-founded belief it is to the scarcity of this fish 
that the present unprecedented scarcity of lobsters is to be attributed. 
Another industry to which some attention was given, looking to an 
extension of the fishery in the United States, was the gathering of 
seaweed in france. This is one of the leading water products of that 
country, the value of these marine vegetabies taken annually on the 
west and south coasts being upward of $1,000,000. In the United 
States, with a vastly longer coast. line and a much greater abundance 
of useful alge, the yearly production is insignificant. 
