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in this building. I hope to induce some of our fisher people 

 to send a supply to the fish-market here so soon as the 

 season opens, which it will in a few weeks, and I think that 

 with the great advantages offered here, we may succeed 

 where others, under less favourable circumstances, have 

 failed. Spain is running us so close in the business of 

 supplying salted pilchards for the markets of the Roman 

 Catholic countries, that we could easily find thirty to forty 

 millions offish for the supply of a fresh fish market without 

 feeling the loss of them. This apparently enormous 

 number would be a mere flea-bite out of our catch for a 

 season. It would be a day's, or at most two day's successful 

 fishing for the seines of St. Ives alone. And this brings me 

 to the support of Professor Huxley in his remark, that in 

 the waters frequented by the pilchard the sea, taken acre 

 for acre, is of greater pecuniary value than the land. A 

 seine when " shot " around a shoal of pilchards may enclose 

 an acre of superficial water, certainly not more than two. 

 It is on record that the seines in St. Ives Bay did on one 

 occasion, in one day, capture 10,000 hogsheads, or over 30 

 millions of pilchards, worth, over the boat's side, 2 per 

 hogshead. I do not know the number of seines employed, 

 but they could not possibly have exceeded 20; but, 

 supposing they were 20, then 20 acres, or at the highest 

 figure 40 acres of sea yielded ^"20,000 as its produce for 

 one day, and each season consists of many days, and the 

 fisherman pays no rent.* 



* The greatest recorded catch by one seine at one shot was made 

 at St. Ives in 1868. There 5,600 hogsheads, or over 16 millions of 

 pilchards, were saved out of one seine. This catch was worth between 

 ,11,000 and ,12,000. Remarks of precisely the same character, but 

 differing in detail, apply to our trawling grounds, but as pilchards are 

 never taken by the trawler, I only allude to this fact. 



