[ 380 | 
Food from the Sea. 
Being the Presidential Address delivered before the 
Plymouth Institution, October 14th, 1915. 
By 
E. J. Allen, D.Sc., F.R.S., 
Director of the Plymouth Laboratory. 
[Reprinted from the Transactions of the Plymouth Institution. ] 
_. . PaAssInG now to the special subject of my address to-night, I will 
ask your attention in the first place to some general aspects of our Sea 
Fisheries as a source of national food supply and to the general scientific 
investigations which have been undertaken in the hope that the yield 
of the harvest of the sea may be still further increased. In the second 
place a more detailed account will be attempted of some particular re- 
searches bearing upon these matters, which happen to have formed 
during the past few years the subject of my own special work. [in the 
course of my remarks you may seem to be asked to follow me in excessive 
detail into some of the more remote corners of the problems which 
arise, my excuse must be that, even at the risk of upsetting the balance 
of the picture as a whole, it is probably possible to speak to more purpose 
and with a better prospect of stimulating others to fresh efforts, by 
describing researches with which I have been personally concerned, than 
by a more general and better proportioned, but necessarily more super- 
ficial treatment of the whole subject. 
As a direct consequence of our geographical position, our immediate 
proximity to large areas of shallow sea, our extended coast-line, with its 
many fine harbours and serviceable fishing coves, lying at distances not 
too remote from the large centres of population, and of our well-developed 
railway systems, the sea fisheries of Great Britain have become of much 
greater relative importance as a source of food supply than has been 
the case in almost any other country of the world. The statistics for the 
year 1915, the last complete year for which normal figures are available, 
show that 1} million tons of fish were landed in England, Scotland and 
Ireland, having a value at the port of landing of some 15 million pounds. 
