41 



If these facts be considered from our present knowledge of 

 the age of the summer feeding shoals, which have been shown to 

 consist chiefly of fish in their fourth 3'ear, and the large numbers 

 of fish with six and seven winter rings in the samples of spring 

 spawTiers, there seem to be good grounds for concluding that by 

 the time the herrings are in their sixth 3'ear (1894) they have 

 contranatated from the East Coast to the waters of the Orkney 

 and Shetland Islands, and that an abundance of herrings in these 

 northern waters, as found in 1894, gives another abundant fishing 

 in the same waters six years afterwards. 



The accounts given by the fishery officers of the herring fishing 

 for their districts in this year of abundance, 1892, are of interest. 

 For Eyemouth, Leith, Montrose and Stonehaven the herrings 

 were described as being soft and tender, small and immature, 

 and generally smaller or containing a greater proportioii of small 

 than in previous years. For the Aberdeen district the herrings 

 improved toAvards the end of July and in August. Herrings of 

 superior quality and of good size were landed at Peterhead, 

 Fraserburgh and Banff. Further west in the Moray Firth, Buckie 

 and Findhorn, the herrings were small and of inferior quality. An 

 improvement was shoA\ii for Cromarty, and this gradually increased 

 through the Helmsdale and Lybster districts until Wick was 

 reached, where the quality was good. The best fisheries, as far as 

 quality was concerned, Avere those in the vicinity of Peterhead 

 and Wick, where they now exist, and to the south of these fishing 

 grounds were large quantities of younger fish. The amount of 

 contranatation necessar}^ for the abundant shoals of the East 

 Coast, say off Peterhead, to influence the fisheries of the Orknej^s 

 and Shetlands two years afterwards, 1894, is from 1| to 3 degrees 

 of latitude. 



In previous rej)orts attention has been drawn to the disappear- 

 ance of autumn spaAAiiing shoals oft" the Northumberland Coast, 

 and the sjoawning in these waters has never been of any great 

 extent since herring investigations were commenced at Cullercoats 

 in 1911. From further information autumn spawning shoals 

 have disappeared from the Yorkshire coast, in the vicinity of 

 Skinningrove, and from the Firth of Forth. Some thirty years ago 

 it was a common thing for large shoals to come quite close inshore 

 in the autumn between St. Abb's Head and the mouth of the 



