THE BRITISH FISH TRADE. 65 



have been literally fulfilled. The statements which thus 

 have been made for 330 years of the approaching ex- 

 haustion of the herring fishery have, one after another, been 

 falsified by the result. Of course the wolf may come at 

 last. But the shepherd, who has been told for 330 

 years that the wolf was always coming, and has never yet 

 known him come, may venture to hope for the security of 

 his flock for a little time longer. 



But some people are not satisfied with such an argument 

 as this. Their ancestors, they think, may have been wrong 

 in supposing that the limited machinery at their disposal 

 was capable of exhausting the sea. But modern energy 

 has developed the fishery to such an extent that existing 

 appliances for the capture of fish bear no comparison with 

 the old engines which they have superseded. All fish, so 

 they argue, must in one stage of their existence be young 

 and small ; if they are killed when they are young, it is 

 impossible that they can grow till they are old; and, by 

 destroying a fish when it is young, we are really killing a 

 creature of no value, which, if we only wait patiently, will 

 become of great value. But, in the first place, people do 

 not act in this way in other matters. They do not hesitate 

 to eat an egg worth a penny, because it might, if it were 

 put into an incubator, be gradually developed into a chicken 

 worth three and sixpence ; and in the next place there is 

 no certainty, there is even no reasonable probability that 

 the little fish which a man declined to kill would develop 

 into a mature fish fit for food. On the contrary the chances 

 against it doing so are extraordinarily great. The mortality 

 among fish in the earlier stages of their existence is so large 

 that the destruction of small fish by man, wasteful as it 

 may seem, can have no appreciable effect on the stock of 

 fish in the sea, 



VOL. I. II. *" 



