BRITISH, COLONIAL AND OTHER CORRESPONDENCE, ETC. 597 



and shoals of much larger size are on record. It is safe to say that, 

 scattered through the North Sea and the Atlantic, at one and the 

 same time, there must be scores of shoals, any one of which would 

 go a long way toward supplying the whole of man's consumption of 

 herrings. I do not believe that all the herring-fleets taken together 

 destroy five per cent, of the total number of herrings in the sea in 

 any year, and I see no reason to swerve from the conviction my 

 colleagues and I expressed in our report, that their destructive opera- 

 tions are totally insignificant when compared with those which, as a 

 simple calculation shows, must regularly and normally go on. 



Suppose that every mature female herring lays 10,000 eggs, that the 

 fish are not interfered with by man, and that their numbers remain 

 approximately the same year after year, it follows that 9,998 of the 

 progeny of every female must be destroyed before they reach maturity. 

 For, if more than two out of the 10,000 escape destruction, the number 

 of herrings will be proportionately increased. Or, in other words, if 

 the average strength of the shoals which visit a given locality is to 

 remain the same year by year, many thousand times the number 

 contained in those shoals must be annually destroyed. And how this 

 enormous amount of destruction is effected will be obvious to any one 

 who considers the operations of the fin-whales, the porpoises, the 

 gannets, the gulls, the codfish, and the dog-fish, which accompany 

 the shoals and perennially feast upon them; to say nothing of the 

 flat-fish which prey upon the newly-deposited spawn ; or of the mack- 

 erel, and the innumerable smaller enemies which devour the fry in 

 all stages of their development. It is no uncommon thing to find 

 five or six nay, even ten or twelve herrings in the stomach of a 

 codfish and in 1863 we calculated that the whole take of the great 

 Scotch herring-fisheries is less than the number of herrings which 

 would in all probability have been consumed by the codfish captured 

 in the same waters if they had been left in the sea. 



Man, in fact, is but one of a vast cooperative society of herring- 

 catchers, and, the larger the share he takes, the less there is for the rest 

 of the company. If man took none, the other shareholders would have 

 a larger dividend, and would thrive and multiply in proportion, but 

 it would come to pretty much the same thing to the herrings. 



As long as the records of history give us information, herrings 

 appear to have abounded on the east coast of the British Islands, and 

 there is nothing to show, so far as I am aware, that, taking an average 

 of years, they were ever either more or less numerous than they are 

 at present. But, in remarkable contrast with this constancy, the 

 shoals of herrings have elsewhere exhibited a change capricious- 

 ness visiting a given locality for many years in great numbers, and 

 then suddenly disappearing. Several well-marked examples of this 

 fickleness are recorded on the west coast of Scotland; but the most 



In his valuable "Report on the Salt- Water Fisheries of Norway" (1877), 

 Professor Sars expresses the belief that full-grown codfishes feed chiefly, if not 

 exclusively, on herrings. 



In 1879 rather more that 5,000,000 cod, ling, and hake, were taken by tht 

 Scottish fishermen. Allowing each only two herrings a day, these fishes would 

 have consumed more than 3,500,000,000 of herrings in a year. As to the Nor- 

 wegian fisheries, 20,000,000 codfishes are said to be taken annually by the 

 Loffoden fishermen alone. 



