for the capture of these fish might be made very much more 

 efficient with very great advantage. 



Such an improvement in the methods of capture might 

 very easily be expected as our acquaintance with the habits 

 of fish increased ; and it is consequently essential to the 

 future development of the fisheries that, from this point 

 of view alone, a systematic study of these questions should 

 be conducted under the control of a central institution 

 where results would be recorded and whence practical 

 information would be disseminated among those who would 

 be benefited thereby. 



It not infrequently happens that, while the fishermen in 

 one country are groping in the dark towards the discovery 

 of an improved mode of fishing, a new form of net, a fresh 

 kind of bait, or a handier rig for their boats, their fellow 

 craftsmen in other countries have anticipated them, and 

 improvements have become established facts in one country 

 which in another exist only as vague ideas. An illustra- 

 tion of this has come under my notice in the present 

 Exhibition. In the collection of nets from Cornwall is 

 shown a model of an improvement in seine nets, suggested 

 by Mr. Matthias Dunn of Mevagissey. A seine net is a net 

 which is shot in a circle round a shoal of fish, so as to com- 

 pletely surround them, the head-rope of the net being 

 buoyed by corks and kept floating on the surface, while the 

 foot-rope is leaded so as to touch the ground, A large 

 shoal of pilchards or mackerel can be enclosed in this way 

 beyond possibility of escape, and the fish are then taken out 

 of the water in detachments by means of a smaller net, called 

 a " tuck-net," which is shot inside the seine, until all the 

 shoal has been caught. But, from the nature of the case, a 

 seine can only be used in shallow water, and the fishermen 

 have to wait until the fish are within such a distance of the 



