An Immense Industry 297 



the upper millstone of Napoleon and the nether mill- 

 stone of England, which completed their ruin. But 

 such a people could not long be kept down, and ac- 

 cordingly towards the end of the first half of the 

 nineteenth century they began to recover again, and 

 have now built up a fine trade once more. 



All this time we were too busy fighting and de- 

 veloping in other directions to pay much heed to the 

 Herring fishery, but at last, having destroyed the 

 Dutch fishing fleet, we began to feel the need of estab- 

 lishing a much larger fishery for the supply of our 

 own increasing wants. And this impetus given to 

 the business has lasted until now, the greatest develop- 

 ment, however, having shown itself among the Scotch, 

 who boast that their Loch Fyne Herring are the finest 

 in the world. 



On the coast of Newfoundland and as far North 

 as Labrador, there is a considerable amount of Herring 

 fishing carried on, the fish being of a larger and fatter 

 kind than are found over here. But the business is 

 so dwarfed by the great cod fishery that we hear very 

 little of it. There is, however, a rather important 

 fishery carried on farther south, off the New England 

 coast, that of the ' Menhaden.' a species of Herring 

 which is so rich in oil as to be hardly eatable. It is 

 caught in immense quantities for the purpose of ex- 

 tracting the oil, which fetches a good price, and the 

 dried fish remaining is used for manure. 



But one of the mo.^t peculiar facts in connection 

 with the Herring is the persistent way in which one 

 branch of the family, the Pilchard {Clupea pilchardus), 

 remains faithful to the south-western corner of England, 

 the counties of Devon and Cornwall being thus favoured 

 to the almost total exclusion of any other part of the 

 country. In this they differ greatly from the Herring 



