258 THE COMMERCIAL SEA FISHES OF 



instrument of capture than baskets tied on long poles," a 

 condition of affairs which hardly applies to the present 

 time. 



At Wick the largest race usually arrives with the new 

 year, remaining until about March, and then disappears. 

 Mr. Reid found in January, 1882, that some were a foot in 

 length, and thick in proportion, but all were full of milt or 

 roe. The next herrings come in May or June, in the shape 

 of a few small ones of little value as food, although useful 

 as bait for other fishes, and which appear to be the fore- 

 runners of the summer fish, as they grow better, larger, and 

 fatter as the season advances, until they are in perfection 

 about July and August, spawning about the end of the latter 

 month or early in September, after which they disappear until 

 the succeeding January. If we turn to the Herring Fishery 

 Report of 1878, we are informed that " it is a very remark- 

 able circumstance that the yield of the fishery at Wick 

 began to decline at the very period at which the produce of 

 the Aberdeenshire fisheries began to increase " (Ixiii.). 

 Here it would be as well to consider whether any change 

 was during this period instituted in the working of the 

 Wick fisheries which might account for the migrations of 

 the fish elsewhere. Mitchell, who wrote in 1864, remarked 

 on the herring appearing off Wick, the Moray Firth, and 

 Aberdeenshire in June, but he observed they are at first so 

 small that the nets cannot catch them, but they begin to 

 be of sufficient size in July. (At this time the mesh of the 

 nets was not less than one inch between knot and knot.*) 



* Mr. de Caux observes that for the purpose of capturing herrings 

 the mesh of the nets since 1864 has diminished off the Norfolk coast 

 to forty or forty-four to the yard, ten to twenty years ago five-sixths of 

 the catch were full fish, but for the last ten years the proportion has 

 not been above two-fifths, due to the change in the mesh of the net ; 

 these immature herrings will take the salt, but they will not keep. 



