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advocate all sorts of protective legislation for the sea-fisheries 

 — the proposed Society would find a large and useful sphere 

 of operations. Such work would form a necessary part of 

 its larger duty of examining into all questions affecting the 

 productiveness of the fisheries and the direction man's 

 operations should take in developing them. 



Many of these questions are matters requiring years of 

 incessant study. In the meantime, however, we may 

 arrive at something like a practical solution of the problem 

 in a shorter way by collecting accurate statistics of the 

 quantities of each kind of fish caught every year, and of 

 the number of men engaged in the various fisheries, to- 

 gether with the area of netting or the number of hooks 

 employed by them. 



The Legislature would then have something tangible 

 upon which it could decide whether to accede to, or to 

 resist, the demands of the fishermen for the suppression or 

 regulation of this, that, or the other method of fishing. 

 But it is not merely on the point — essential as its con- 

 sideration is — whether the yield of any kind of fish is 

 diminishing or not, and to what causes — natural or arti- 

 ficial — such diminution is attributable, that a National 

 Fisheries Society could render a national service. The 

 question of " police " is largely involved in the allegations 

 which one class of fishermen urge against another. If the 

 line-fishermen were not affected by the competition of the 

 trawlers, or the seiners by that of the drifters, and so on, 

 and if there were none of the unfortunate occasions for 

 complaints of injury done by one kind of gear to another, 

 which occur from time to time, I venture to think we 

 should hear less of the harmfulness of the new modes of 

 fishing. But it is essential that no lawful mode of fishing 

 should be needlessly or wantonly interfered with by 



