382 Ee oe AEN: 
ment of the fisheries may well be left to the energy and enterprise of 
the fishing industry. The only useful help which the scientific expert 
might give, would be in making preliminary explorations of more distant 
grounds. Government has, however, never thought it right to provide 
public funds for work of this character, and it is probably better to 
leave it to the trade and the practical fishermen. 
The subject with which fishery science is called upon to deal is rather, 
whether the best possible use is being made of the resources of food which 
the sea is capable of yielding in those waters in which fishing is already 
extensively and exhaustively carried on. British researches have dealt 
chiefly with the North Sea, the Irish Sea, the English Channel and the 
waters around the Irish coast. Are the methods of fishing now employed 
in these areas unnecessarily wasteful of fish life or could the total annual 
landings be made more valuable by a more rational regulation of the 
methods of capture ? Are there other means, analogous to the cultiva- 
tion of the land, which might be adopted to improve the yield of the 
fishing grounds and to what extent could such means be profitably 
employed ? 
It must be at once admitted that, except to a very limited extent, 
we are not at present in a position to give definite answers to these 
questions. We cannot assert with confidence that any attempted re- 
gulation of the fisheries upon a considerable scale has been followed by 
marked and definite improvement. In matters of cultivation also, 
excepting as regards some of the fisheries for shell-fish, such as oysters 
and mussels, we are unable to point with certainty to any success upon 
a large scale, when dealing with sea fish. 
And the reasons for this comparative inability to obtain favourable 
practical results are not far to seek. In the first place, the sea is so vast 
and so powerful are its elemental forces, that control by human agency 
must always be immensely difficult. We should not forget, however, 
that the evidence is now almost conclusive that human agency has been 
powerful enough to exert a marked adverse influence upon many of the 
best and most productive fishing grounds, and if destruction can be 
wrought by man, it should not be beyond his power to do something 
to repair the damage he has caused. 
In the second place, our knowledge of the many complex factors with 
which we have to deal is still very imperfect. It is, indeed, only very 
slowly approaching a point when proposals for practical measures can be 
made with any hope of foreseeing what the actual effect of those pro- 
posals would be. In this direction much further enquiry and study will 
be required. Notwithstanding all that has been done in the way of 
research during the last thirty or forty years the gaps in our knowledge 
