90 FISHERIES OF THE NORTH SEA 



He had no distant thought of the ultimate 

 welfare of the whole industry; the im- 

 mediate grist to his own mill was always 

 the great soul-absorbing object. The in- 

 dividual businesses, generally speaking, 

 were many and of small extent ; probably 

 in the future there will be fewer businesses 

 engaged in the work, but those fewer busi- 

 nesses will be of much greater size. At 

 present there is not a single million pound 

 business engaged in the industry. There 

 is far more capital engaged in the manu- 

 facture of British soap than is used in the 

 exploitation of the British fisheries. A 

 large business can afford to experiment 

 greatly, can test new ideas, can build a 

 ship of a new type, can explore a new 

 fishing ground, can adventure with oil and 

 electricity, motors and turbines. A private 

 individual with^a small-scale business cannot 

 afford to do this. To-day scientific research 

 in our fisheries is almost absent ; it is in 

 fact probable that there are not three 

 chemists employed in the whole industry : 

 little is known of the food values of different 

 fish or the constituents of the by-products, 

 or the most efficient and economical pro- 



