THE OCEAN AS A SOURCE OF FOOD SUPPLY 161 



good food which rapidly becomes an offence to the 

 senses and a danger to health by reason of its essen- 

 tially perishable nature. It is almost like the manna 

 of the Israelites, which, supplied daily, must be eaten 

 daily, or it bred worms and stank. 



And this, too, in spite of the fact that in various 

 ways the harvest of the sea may be stored, may be 

 kept for indefinite periods after special treatment. It 

 is obvious that the quantities which may be thus 

 treated for preservation are strictly limited, and will 

 be still in a special sense, even though the needs of 

 man should compel him to depend more and more 

 upon the harvest of the sea for food. But, before 

 going further, I must, to avoid misapprehension, ad- 

 vert for a moment to what I have said as to the inex- 

 haustibility of the food supply of the sea. I shall be 

 told that in certain regions man's efforts have depleted 

 the sea to such an extent that it has been found neces- 

 sary to abandon the fishery there, at least partially, as 

 being no longer remunerative, and in other portions of 

 the sea near the coasts of our own islands, for instance, 

 it has been considered essential to enforce certain laws 

 as to prohibiting times of fishing, and also to disallow 

 fishing within three miles of the shore. But this 

 apparently exhaustible character of the ocean as a 

 food store only applies to those portions of the sea 

 easily within man's reach, as on certain banks in the 

 North Sea, every foot of which may be dredged over 

 by the powerful steam trawlers, and to the shallows 

 near shore which have been so long and patiently 

 searched by the fishermen. Moreover, in the former 

 case the peculiar kinds of fish which are becoming 

 scarcer, and are, as the fishermen say sometimes, not to 



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