of the Fishery Board for Scotland. 7 
of marketable size were exceedingly scarce, the total catch of these 
being under twenty boxes for all the trips together, and more than 
half of them were obtained in February; in September they 
totalled five boxes, and in November a box and a half. 
On the other hand, immense shoals of young haddocks, under 
two years of age, were present in the bays in autumn, from which 
they were absent in the spring, and by far the greater part of those 
taken were thrown overboard as unmarketable. 
Some of the hauls may be referred to as showing the enormous 
destructive power possessed by the modern otter-trawl when 
employed in shallow bays at certain seasons. In six hauls in the 
Dornoch Firth at the end of September, the duration of the actual 
fishing bemg 25? hours, 25,563 fishes were caught, and of these, 
18,809, or 734 per cent., were thrown overboard as unmarketable. 
The number of haddocks taken in these six hauls was large, viz., 
10,361, but only 594 of them were large enough to be marketable, 
96 per cent. of the catch being returned to the sea. The prevalence 
of the small haddocks on the ground in autumn, and their scarcity 
in spring, may be shown in another way. While in February it 
took ten hours’ trawling to catch one unmarketable haddock and 
two marketable, the number of the former taken in the same time 
in September was 4196 and of the latter 166. The capture of 
small unmarketable plaice was also very considerable on this 
ground in autumn, 54 per cent. of the 13,610 plaice caught in the 
six hauls being rejected on account of their small size. 
All the young haddocks and a large proportion of the young 
plaice caught in this way perish, although under favourable 
conditions many of the latter may be preserved. 
It was shown formerly by similar investigations on board 
commercial trawlers fishing on the deeper grounds in the North 
Sea that the percentage of small fish taken there was less than in 
the waters near shore. In the Moray Firth in February the 
proportion of the unmarketable was 19 per cent., and in autumn it 
was 67 per cent. 
Observations were also made on the maturity and growth of the 
fishes caught, and a number of experiments were carried on with 
small-meshed nets. 
THE HATCHING AND REARING OF PLAICE. 
Owing to the formation of a new road at the Bay of Nigg last 
year, the Town Council of Aberdeen, from whom the site of the 
hatchery is leased, desired that that building and some others 
might be transferred to an adjoining payt of the ground and 
re-erected at their expense. To this proposal the Board agreed, 
and the hatchery, the boiler and pump-house, and the storehouse 
were accordingly taken down and rebuilt on the new site. 
The change involved considerable re-arrangement of the pipes, 
&c., and the opportunity was made use of to effect some improve- 
ments which experience had shown to be desirable. The Town 
Council gave all reasonable facilities for the alterations and 
improvements being carried out, so that the hatchery is now better 
adapted for the work than it was before. The building itself is 
