25 
fishermen, some of their boats landing from ten to twenty- 
five hundredweight of fish every day. At a meeting at 
Eyemouth some short time ago, a gentleman from Birming- 
ham stated that he had to pay as much as £100 to get fish 
from Glasgow to Birmingham, but very likely a great por- 
tion of the fish had come in the first instance from Ireland. 
It was a mistake to say that fish spawned only at the 
bottom, as he had seen a large quantity of eggs which had 
been found upon some seaweed floating at the top of the 
water. The practice of destroying immature fish greatly 
interfered with the fishing in Berwickshire. Herrings were 
very careful where they deposited their spawn, the usual 
place being upon a gravelly bottom. His opinion was, 
that the herring matured in about ten months. 
Mr. JOHN HELYER (Great Yarmouth) said that for thirty 
years he had been engaged in deep-sea fishing in all its 
branches in all parts of the world; he was master of a 
trawler for twenty years, and for the last ten years had 
been admiral of a fleet in the North Sea. During all this 
time he had seen, from the Jutland Coast to The Hague, 
some hundreds of thousands of tons of immature fish taken 
not only by English fishermen, but by those of every nation. 
There was as much destruction of immature fish by vessels 
crossing the sea as took place on the shore, and he thought 
something ought to be done to put a stop to it, though 
what measures should be adopted he would leave to persons 
wiser than himself to suggest. 
Captain CURTIS asked what was the percentage of imma- 
ture fish taken by the trawlers as compared with full-sized 
fish. His object in asking the question was to see whether 
it would pay fishermen to bring undersized fish ashore in 
order to sell it as manure, to convert into fish guano, 
Mr. HELYER said the percentage was 60 or 70 per cent. 
