1897] NOTES AND COMMENTS 229 
LossterR FISHERY 
Mr James HorNELL has contributed two long letters to the Jersey 
Times and the Jersey Evening Post relative to the Lobster 
Fishery of the Channel Islands. There is a marked and general 
decrease in the size of the catches, and some arrangements are 
needful for regulating and preserving the supply. Mr Hornell is 
of the opinion that the geographical position of the Channel Islands 
precludes—in view of the powerful currents sweeping their coasts— 
any useful purpose being served by the hatching and liberation of 
fry, wherever fry are surface swimmers for any considerable length 
of time. He does not forget in his argument that the currents 
may reverse their direction at regular times, but urges the import- 
ance of a detailed and exact investigation of current action around 
the islands before costly means are undertaken for stocking pur- 
poses. And at the same time he casts doubts from his own obser- 
vation on the accepted idea that the young lobster is a pelagic 
animal, because he has found that in some experiments he has made 
that while he lost most of the fry by the surface pipe of his 
aquarium, those of the age of three days seemed inclined to sink 
to the bottom and abandon a surface life. Again, Mr Hornell has 
never once taken lobster fry in his almost continuous towings with 
fine muslin nets on the south coast of Jersey, while the fry of 
erabs, prawns, and Sguwilla occur in countless thousands. His 
method for the improvement and protection of the Lobster Fishery 
would be to rigidly enforce the protection of the berried female 
and all lobsters under nine inches, rather than to commence a 
nursery, both costly and difficult to manage. At the same time, if 
experiment were to prove the non-pelagic nature of the fry, then 
culture and liberation might be useful, in addition to the protective 
regulations referred to above. 
PRE-CAMBRIAN (?) RADIOLARIA IN AUSTRALIA 
Pror. EpGEwortTH Davin and Mr Walter Howchin announce in the 
Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, pt. 4, 1896, 
the discovery of Radiolaria in rocks of supposed Pre-Cambrian age 
in the neighbourhood of Hallett’s Cove, about fifteen miles 8.S.W. 
from Adelaide. The fossils occur in a dark, greenish-grey silicious 
limestone, and in a fine-grained laminated grey clay-shale, but they 
are very obscure and badly preserved. 
Although no other fossils have been found at Brighton and 
Crystal Brook in the rocks in which the Radiolaria occur, there is a 
rich and abundant fauna in the Cambrian series of the district; but 
