73 
- Firth of Clyde. About the same time, a trawler fish- 
ing from Scarborough, laid three soles on the pier at 
that place with the observation that they were ‘ the last 
three in the sea ;’ while in 1837 a petition presented 
to Parliament declared that the fishermen of Scotland, 
Ireland, and Holland had -found out the breeding- 
places of the herrings, and had resorted there to catch 
them, and that since the discovery was made the fishery 
generally. throughout the West and North of Scotland 
had annually decreased. It is an instructive com- 
mentary on the petition that the yield of the Scotch 
herring fishery was actually increasing at the time at 
which it was presented, and that the yield is now more 
-than double what it wasthen. In the same way the 
* people who now complain of the want of fish in the 
~TIrish Sea forget that similar complaints were made by 
their ancestors more than a century ago. The people 
who ascribe the recent failure of the herring fishery in 
the Firth of Clyde to the introduction of circle trawl- 
ing forget that Jeffrey had noticed the failure before 
circle trawling was introduced. — There is always, in 
fact, a temptation to ascribe any failure in the yield of 
any particular fishery to some interference on the part 
Giimans o lihere is always a temptation to overlook the 
fact that the same failures periodically occurred when 
the operations of man, slight as we believe them to be, 
were much more imperceptible than they are now, and 
to ignore the consequent inference that failures have 
occurred in the past, and may, therefore, occur again 
in the future, from’ causes which man has been, and 
| probably still is, unable to control.” 
