212 THE RELATIONS OF THE STATE WITH 



appliances might be adopted which would vastly increase 

 the supply of fish without injuring the permanent stock 

 in the sea. Both with this object, and for the purpose of 

 deciding whether any, and what, restrictions on fishing are 

 necessary, a fuller knowledge of the habits of sea-fish is 

 essential. But only the most careful and continuous 

 investigation will discover the manifold laws of Nature 

 which govern the migrations of fish, their spawning times 

 and places, their development, the nature of their food, and 

 all the other secrets of their economy. In the case of the 

 herring fisheries alone a knowledge of these facts would 

 possibly have saved many a thriving centre of the herring 

 fishery from the decay which has followed the mysterious 

 disappearance of these fish from the coast. If, when the 

 fishermen are lamenting the absence of the accustomed 

 shoals of herring on their coasts, and fruitlessly throwing 

 the blame on their neighbours, the State could step in with 

 the assertion that the fish had disappeared because of 

 certain conditions, either of temperature, of food, or of cur- 

 rents, which the fishermen could hardly be expected to take 

 cognizance of, and could tell them where they, or others 

 like them, could be found, it would be giving the most 

 substantial form of encouragement to the fisheries. Many 

 thriving cities, founded, so to speak, on a shoal of fishes, 

 have risen to a state of great wealth and influence through 

 the fisheries in their immediate neighbourhood, and have 

 Mysterious as suddenly fallen into decay through the fish forsaking the 



disappearance T , , . - _ T1f 



and return of coast. In the history of Ullapool in our own time, and, in 

 remoter, ages, of Marstrand and Uddevalla,* and other cities 



* The history of the fluctuations in the fisheries of the Province of 



. Bohuslan affords the most remarkable examples of intermittent 



abundance and scarcity of herrings. For about 30 years, more or 



less, in succession, in each century from the loth to the i/th, the 



