74 



already being tolerably rell handled; the technique is constantly 

 bjxng- dGveioped in America by the Fisheries Services of Canada and of 

 the United States, and has oeen carried still farther by the Inter- 

 national Council for the Exploration of the Sea in l^crth Europe. In 

 fact, the statistical studies of various fisheries that have been 

 published have already reached proportions that make analysis almost 

 impossible. But for reaeons inherent in the governmental operation of 

 scientific establishir.ent s, these bureaux hsve"'not been able to make 

 comr.ensurate progress in the biological side of the matter, without 

 which the attempt to interpret the trends that the statistics of the 

 catches disclose, whether up, down or stationary, will probably prove 

 idle or even misleading. Thus there is no general agreement as to the 

 meaning of the fluctuations in the plaice fishery as a whole, nor in 

 the relative abundance of small and large plaice in the commercial 

 caoch, one school explaining the recorded phenomena in one way, 

 another in another, although this fish has been under statistical 

 examination by m^any hands for many years. 



In fact, it is not too much to say that if we regard the time and 

 effort that hes been expended on investigptions of the sea fisheries 

 as capital, little has yet been returned as interest to the fishing 

 industry, or through them to the consumer ashore. 



The reason for such a poverty of result from so great an effort 

 has been our ignorances of the interrelationships of the very complex 

 chain of events in the sea that govern the comparative success or 

 failure of its inhabitants in the struggle for life. Nothing in the 

 sea falls haphazard. If we cannot predict, it is because we do not 

 know the cause, or how the cause works. The obstacle to the advance 

 of knowledge, here lies in part in the technical difficulty of carry- 

 ing on the needed investigations into the basic biology of the commer- 

 cial fishes on a scale broad enough to serve as foundation for the 

 easier-gathered statistical data. A more serious obstacle, when seek- 

 ing support (intellectual or financial) for such work, is that in 

 every case the matter is so obscure that it is impossible to predict 

 in advance what particular .phase in the fishes' life history will 

 prove to be the vital one, or even that knowledge of any one is more 

 important than of any other. The whole life chain must be traced link 

 by link before any sound understanding of it can be reached, which 

 calls for critical and protracted investigations in biology (including 

 physiology), often ramifying inxo chemistry and physics. Thus, if the 

 conservation and development of the marine fisheries is to rest on a 

 sound basis, many problems m^ust be attacked in the sea that seem at 

 first sight utterly remote from any practical application. But at 

 present it is almost impossible to secure the necessary financial 

 support for such work ov3r a period long enough for the study to reach 

 a productive stage. The result has been that in fisheries investiga- 

 tions the statistical has far outstripped the biologic, whereas logi- 

 cally the reverse ought to be the case. In short, we have too often 

 been building the structure from the roof downward. 



This one-sided development has its reflection in the fact that 

 great as has been the emiount of thought and effort centered on fish- 

 eries problems during the past quarter century, and great the a:r:ount 

 of money expended, we do not yet know what precise combination of 

 factors favors or opposes a good year of production for a single 

 species of marine fish. Worse yet, from tne economic standpoint, we 



