FISHERMEN AND FISHERIES. 233 



Magna Charta), in estuaries or by the sea. All fish are 

 welcome. Beyond carefully providing the accommodation 

 and selecting its site their hosts display no particular skill 

 or energy in proffering an invitation. These engines are 

 adapted more or less on the principle of easy ingress and 

 impossible egress exemplified in the baited lobster-pot, or 

 the common inland-river eel-trap. There are valid reasons 

 which may not improbably lead legislation to discourage 

 those engines which, like weirs, but unlike lobster-creels or 

 stow-nets, are permanently fixed to the sea-bed. They 

 produce an "unearned increment" to the owner of the 

 grant, irrespective of his skill or of his being a member of 

 the fishing community proper; they are a restriction on 

 the common freedom of the sea-bed ; they catch all fish, 

 irrespective of size, without the possibility of returning 

 them otherwise than moribund to the water ; and their 

 position on the coast may often render them an inconve- 

 nience to the Crown. 



The order of the importance of the above fisheries is that 

 in which they have been placed, except that the first two, 

 in addition to being more important than the others, are 

 perhaps of equal consideration. In the first and the third, 

 in trawling and ^r0#;&/-seaning, one net alone is used, and 

 the working of these (as well as the choice of the locality) 

 requires great skill. In drifting there are many nets, and 

 although much skill is required in shooting and hauling them 

 up, in the water, when the site has once been chosen, they 

 chiefly work themselves. The skill displayed in keeping a 

 herring-boat at the right distance from its drift-nets is the 

 skill of navigation ; the skill of the smack in slowly drawing 

 its trawl over a sandy bottom at a regulated pace, and that 

 which it displays in drawing it round the edges of rocks 

 where fish resort, so as to catch the fish without tearing the 



