CHAP, vi.] QUANTITY OF NETTING EMPLOYED. 277 



The quantity of netting now employed in the herring- 

 fishery is enormous, and is increasing from year to year. It 

 has been strongly represented by Mr. Cleghorn, and others 

 who hold his views, that the herring-fishery is on the decline ; 

 that if the fish were as plentiful as in former years, the 

 increased amount of netting would capture an increased num- 

 ber of herrings. It is certain that, with a growing popula- 

 tion and an increasing facility of transport, we are able to use 

 a far larger quantity of sea produce now than we could do 

 fifty years ago, when we were in the pre-Stephenson age. 

 If, with our present facilities for the transport of fish to 

 inland towns, Great Britain had been a Catholic instead of 

 a Protestant country, having the example of the French 

 fisheries before us, I have no hesitation in saying that by 

 this time our fisheries would have been completely exhausted 

 that is, supposing no remedial steps had been taken to 

 guard against such a contingency. Were we compelled to 

 observe Lent with Catholic rigidity, and had there been 

 numerous fasts or fish-days, as there used to be in England 

 before the Reformation, the demand, judging from our pre- 

 sent ratio, would have been greater than the sea could have 

 borne. Interested parties may sneer at these opinions ; but, 

 notwithstanding, I maintain that the pitcher is going too 

 often to the well, and that some day soon it will come back 

 empty. 



I have always been slow to believe in the inexhaustibility 

 of the shoals, and can easily imagine the overfishing, which 

 some people pooh-pooh so glibly, to be quite possible, espe- 

 cially when supplemented by the cod and other cannibals so 

 constantly at work, and so well described by the Lochfyne 

 Commission ; not that I believe it possible to pick up or 

 kill every fish of a shoal ; but, as I have already hinted, so 

 many are taken, and the economy of the shoal so disturbed, 

 that in all probability it may change its ground or amalga- 



