8 Part L111 —Twenty-jirst Annual Report 
investigations and practical fishery experiments, and also lays 
particular stress on the compilation and study of precisely such 
statistics of our fisheries as it is the practice of the Board to 
prepare. Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson, the Scientific Member 
of the Board, has been appointed Director of these investigations. 
Scientific work apart from this International Programme, including 
the maintenance of the hatcheryat the Bay of Nigg, will be continued 
by the Board under the superintendence of Dr. T. Wemyss Fulton. 
Meanwhile, and pending the completion of arrangements for the 
new work, trawling experiments in the Moray Firth and Aberdeen 
Bay have been carried on by utilising the services at intervals 
of the large commercial steam-trawlers, equipped with the most 
efficient otter-trawls, and with very satisfactory results, 
INVESTIGATIONS ON BoARD TRAWLERS. 
These, as stated above, were carried on in 1902 as in the preceding 
year, the localities examined being Aberdeen Bay in its whole 
extent, and the chief fishing grounds in the Moray Firth, particu- 
larly Burghead Bay and adjacent parts on the south coast, the 
Dornoch Firth, the grounds of the coast of Caithness, Smith Bank, 
and the deeper water areas known as the Witch Grounds. Two 
voyages to the offshore grounds were also made, one to those lying 
east and south-east of the Shetland Islands, and another to the 
Great Fisher Bank and the waters off the Buchan coast. The 
results are described in a paper in the present Report by Dr. T. 
Wemyss Fulton, the Scientific Superintendent, and the records of 
the hauls are given in a series of Tables. 
In May the grounds in Aberdeen Bay were found to be compara- 
tively unproductive, and the same condition prevailed at the various 
grounds examined in the Moray Firth, Burghead Bay, off Lybster, 
Smith Bank, and off Cromarty. At Burghead Bay, for example, 
the agoregate number of fishes taken in fifteen hauls, representing 
sixty-two-and-a-half hours of actual fishing, was 14,257, of which 
10,301 were marketable. The average number taken per hour's 
fishing, with the largest otter-trawl in use, was thus scarcely 165 
fishes of all kinds. The deep-water grounds off the Shetlands 
were found to be more productive in the same month, ten hauls. 
representing fifty hours of actual fishing, yielding 18,634 fishes, or 
at the rate of 372°7 fishes per hour’s fishing, the same vessel being 
employed, and of the aggregate number 14,984 were marketable. 
A little later, at the end of May and beginning of June, a series of 
nine completely recorded hauls on the Great Fisher Bank, repre- 
senting thirty hours’ fishing, furnished only 4,096 fishes, or at the 
rate of 113°8 fishes per hour—less, therefore, than in the Moray 
Firth. The proportion of the different kinds of fishes in the various 
areas differed considerably—plaice, for instance, being well repre- 
sented in the Moray Firth, present in fair numbers on the Great 
Fisher Bank, and absent on the deep-water grounds ; their presence 
or absence as a rule has an important bearing on the profitable or 
unprofitable results of the fishing. The Moray Firth was also found 
