FOURTEENTH ANNUM. MKKIINC;. 83 



order to be sold, and when sold to be again carted over the same 

 streets through which it has already with difficulty passed. 



Speaking of the approaches to Billingsgate, the Quarterly Re- 

 view, October, 1882, says : "Their badness was of compara- 

 tively slight importance, so long as the bulk of the fish was 

 brought thither by water. When, however, it became necessary 

 to deal each vear with some 90,000 tons of railway-borne fish, 

 and to deliver them at Billingsgate, through choked streets and 

 narrow lanes which would disgrace a city of 50,000 inhabitants, 

 the difficulties were so augmented that fish vans sometimes 

 took eight hours to get from the Great Eastern or Great North- 

 ern railway terminus to the market where they had to unload." 

 This statement has greater force when it is remembered that 

 the width of the roadway of Lower Thames street, on which the 

 market is situated is but sixteen and a half feet wide. St. Mary- 

 at-hill has a width of sixteen feet, while Botolph lane and Pud- 

 ding lane are each but seven feet three inches wide. 



Language fails to convey to one's mind the bewildered condi- 

 tion of things in the congested approaches to the market, where 

 the stopping of a " shandry," for instance, will block the entire 

 street. It was shown in an investigation made by Spencer Wal- 

 pole, late H. M. Inspector of Fisheries, that ordinarily it not 

 only took hours for fish vans to reach the market, but in one in- 

 stance a van of "fresh fish" was eleven days en route, and all the 

 time trying to get unloaded. A vast amount of good food is 

 very naturally spoiled before it reaches the market, and after- 

 wards, too, for that matter, simply from the absence of proper 

 appliances for its preservation ; and it is not strange that when 

 the fish reach the consumer it is so enhanced in price as to have 

 become a luxury instead of an ordinary article of diet. 



The Times of October 30, 1883, despondingly asks, " Could not 

 science have fish vaults where the temperature was kept at about 

 thirty-three degrees at the markets ? Could not science improve 

 on the ice chests fishmongers use ?" 



We answer unhesitatingly in the affirmative, and cordially in- 

 vite the editor of the ''Thunderer" tt) visit America and see the 

 fish markets in Boston, New York and other centers, where the 



