32 
gain our end, to prohibit trawl-fishing; for zf there be not a breeding-ground 
within the closed water, where the fish will remain, either all its life or at 
any rate for years, it will emigrate from the closed water, and will then 
be caught. Now it seems just to be so in Scotland, says Fulton, that 
common dabs and long rough dabs breed in closed waters, but plaice and 
lemon dabs go out of them, and breed farther out at sea. —- If we in Den- 
mark would close Aalbæk-Bugten, within a lime Cape Skagen —Hirtsholmene, 
against all flat-fish fishery, I suppose the same thing would happen 
with the plaice; there would not be many more, than there. are now, sand 
they would not grow longer than they are; for they would emigrate to 
Læsø and Herthas Flak before they grew large. It has been said that the 
best way to promote the offshore fishery is to protect the inshore fishery, 
for the fry of the plaice comes from the inshore waters; and the best way 
to promote the inshore fishery is to protect the offshore fishery, for the 
large plaice come from the open sea. This would he correct, of course, if 
we could at all consider inshore fishery as the opposite of offshore fishery. 
— If it had been correct, as it was formerly supposed, that an apparatus 
which was dragged along the bottom, and before all the large English 
trawl, destroyed the food of the fishes on the bottom, the discontinuance 
of the trawl-fishing in the Scotch seas for ten years must indisputably have 
caused a very great increase of the food of the fishes, and, no doubt, a 
multitude of fish would then have gone there from neighbouring, unpro- 
tected places. As this did not occur, however, I am confirmed in my 
opinion that the ground-seines are not so detrimental to the food-animals as it 
has been supposed. In the Limfjord where seines of different sorts are 
dragged across the bottom in great numbers, and at very different times of 
the year, certainly many times across the same area every year, we are 
not aware of any destruction of the fish-food; at any rate the plaice thrive 
and grow here better than at most other places in our seas. The opinion 
has even been expressed that ground-seines (eel hand-seines) will positively 
be useful hy removing the zostera at those places where it grows too richly. 
In the report of the last English government committee, 1900, of a 
sea-fisheries bill, they do not speak of any destruction of the lower 
animal or vegetable life caused by the trawl, still less of any destruetion 
of the spawn; and though the committee distinetly maintains "that it is 
proved beyond doubt that there is a very serious diminution of the supply 
of certain kinds of flat-fishes, particularly in the North Sea”, it only men- 
tions as one of the causes of this decrease: "It is quite certain that the 
destruction of fish below a certain size is an evil”. This is a thing we can 
understand, and this is a thing the English investigators have been able 
to show, that the immense multitudes of little flat-fishes which the trawlers 
catch, and which have no value, or next to none, are lost to the North 
Sea, and that, if such a destruction can be avoided, we have gained an 
advantage which will get a great influence on the produce of the fishery. 
