330 ST ANDREWS AND SCIENTIFIC 



without any evident effect on their general abundance and 

 prevalence. In the estuary of the River Thames, shrimping 

 nets of small mesh have been used extensively for seven 

 hundred or eight hundred years, but the daily destruction 

 of young soles has not led to the utter extermination of the 

 supply of this valuable fish in the adjacent deeper waters. 

 Fluctuations in the abundance of fishes generally are universal, 

 but in spite of pessimistic views, complaints, and warnings, 

 extending over two centuries, that in British waters the 

 supply of food fishes was nearing total exhaustion, the fishing 

 industries of the British Islands have been more extensively 

 carried on from our principal ports than at any previous 

 period in history. 1 



FEATURES OF MARINE RESEARCH AT ST ANDREWS 



Certain special features have characterised the fishery 

 work at St Andrews, during the last thirty years, which have 

 been of supreme value to the nation, and of the highest im- 

 portance to Zoological Science. Many of the great Biological 

 Stations, such as the famous and costly station at Naples 

 founded in 1871, have been mainly devoted to researches of 

 a purely technical and scientific nature, and the direct economic 

 bearing of these researches, and their practical results in regard 

 to the prosperity of the fisheries, have been a secondary 

 consideration. 



At St Andrews three principal features have been charac- 

 teristic of the work done, namely (1) the prominence given 

 in zoological teaching in the University to practical work ; to 

 the study of animals on the rocky shores, in the tidal pools, 

 and in the open waters of the adjacent bay, that is to say, the 

 study of the marine life under natural conditions, and the 



1 The exploitation of new fishing grounds, Icelandic and others, is not ignored ; 

 such exploitation being inevitable with the growth in the population of the British Isles 

 from over 25,000,000 in 1841 to nearly 40,000,000 at the present time, seventy years 

 later. 



