11 
which might be indicated. It has been a lengthy and 
troublesome piece of work, lasting most of the winter, 
and over a thousand sheets of statistics have been very 
carefully analysed. The results, I regret to say, are by 
no means commensurate with the labour that has been 
expended. For the majority of fishes and localities the 
statistics are so defective or so vitiated from one cause or 
another that we felt that no reliable conclusions could be 
drawn. In fact it was decided in the end that the only 
area in regard to which we had sufficiently detailed 
information was the shrimping area at the mouth of the 
Mersey. Hence the article on that area by Mr. 
Johnstone and Dr. Jenkins which I include in this Report 
(p. 39). 
But it must not be thought that I regard the 
time and labour which these gentlemen have spent in 
trying in vain to draw conclusions from the remaining 
statistics as lost because they have deduced nothing which 
we are able to publish yet. Var from it: it has led to 
the very important conclusion that the system we have 
hitherto employed on the fisheries steamer and elsewhere 
in the district is really inadequate, that the statistics are 
not taken sufficiently often or with sufficient regularity, 
and are not taken with sufficient detail. If this discovery 
leads to the adoption of a better scheme (such as the one 
I suggest below, p. 24), and to its faithful performance in 
the future, the disappointment we have had in finding 
one after another of the series of statistics broken by 
unfortunate omissions* will be mitigated, and we may 
then hope that the next decade will be so traversed by 
*Due to the circumstance that we have only one small steamer avail- 
able for all the police and other administrative work of a large district, in 
addition to what I cannot but regard as of still greater importance—viz.., 
the observational work on the condition and variations of the fisheries and 
their causes, 
