OF THE GRIMSBY TRAWL FISHERY. 395 
Silver Pits was a phenomenon confined to the winter, and, as I am 
given to understand, soles were always most plentiful there in very 
hard weather. Within recent years the fish taken from the Pits 
consist, according to my observations, chiefly of mature fish; at 
any rate, I have seen no very small ones. I have been told, 
however, that small soles used to be plentiful there; but the 
information, based upon recollections of a fact which, at the time of 
its occurrence, no doubt seemed unimportant, cannot be considered 
as wholly reliable. The Great Silver Pit is about equidistant from 
the summer sole grounds of either coast of the North Sea, and its 
winter supply is recruited, I should imagine, from both coasts. A 
violent gale sometimes has the effect of driving soles into deeper 
water; thus after the great gale of November, 1893, there were 
good takes of these fish in the Yorkshire Hole or Little Silver Pit, 
where none had previously been obtainable. 
Our knowledge of the life-history of the plaice, certainly the most 
important, if by no means the most valuable, of trawl flat-fish, is 
fortunately fairly complete. In the adult condition the species is 
generally distributed all over the North Sea, but is not found very 
close inshore, or in very shallow water on either coast. It is the 
earliest spawner among the fish with which we have to deal here, 
breeding chiefly from the middle of January to the end of March ; 
to some extent a little later, and probably earlier also. There is 
at the spawning season a distinct congregation of mature fish on 
different grounds weil known to the fishermen, such as various 
parts of the Dogger, and a ground lying about fifteen miles off 
Flamborough Head, &c.; but none of these grounds are very close 
inshore, nor, so far as I have been able to discover, does any 
spawning at all take place on the shallow sandy grounds on the 
eastern side of the North Sea. The plaice, in fact, is in the North 
Sea distinctly an offshore spawner, and, as far as its mature con- 
dition is concerned, practically an offshore fish altogether. ‘I'he 
eggs are pelagic,—that is to say, they float at the surface ; but this 
fact is not universally appreciated, even by the more enlightened 
members of the fishing community. There is a substance which 
some deep-sea fishermen regard as plaice-spawn ; what it is I do not 
know, as I have never been able to inspect any of if, and as the 
description given of it is only sufficiently exact to render it pertectly 
certain that the describers’ diagnosis is incorrect. It is said to be 
yellowish in colour, and may possibly be the spawn of the little 
sucker or gobbler (Liparis sp.). Of this I have obtained a good 
deal on and from grounds which are frequented by spawning plaice, 
but have not had an opportunity of showing it to any of the 
exponents of the demersal theory of plaice ova, The inshore 
