40 
Herdman,* on the occurrence and distribution of the 
commoner food fishes on the principal inshore and offshore 
grounds of the Lancashire District. From time to time 
selections from the results so obtained have been published 
either in the Superintendent's Reports or in those of this 
Laboratory. In the autumn of 1899 it was thought 
advisable to make a study of all the data obtained, and as 
a result all the forms (over 1,000) containing the records 
of the observations have now been abstracted. 
These observations were made by the Captain and crew 
of the “John Fell” and by the bailiffs in charge of the 
sub-districts, and are as complete as the police work and 
other administrative duties of the officers permitted. 
They include experimental hauls with fish-trawl] nets of 
various sizes and made under various conditions, hauls 
with shrimp trawls and shank nets, and observations on 
the sizes, spawning, feeding, &e., of the common food 
fishes. On account of the limited staff employed, the 
extent of the district to be worked over and the pressure 
of the police work, these statistics are necessarily very im- 
perfect. It would be premature to publish many of the 
data obtained, especially those of the fish-trawl, at 
present, and we therefore confine ourselves to what seems 
most complete and reliable, viz., the series of experimental 
hauls with shrimp-trawl nets made by Mr. G. Eccles, head 
bailiff for the Southern District, on the Mersey Shrimp- 
ing Grounds. 
It would not serve any useful purpose to publish the 
results of these hauls as recorded ‘by Mr. Eccles in full, 
so we have prepared an abstract of all the data collected 
and present it in the form of Tables I. to VI. Altogether 
248 hauls with a shrimp trawl were made during the ~ 
period 1893-1899. By far the greatest number of these 
* Lancashire Sea Fisheries Laboratory Report for 1892, pp. 41-45, 
