96 HERRIXG. 



us that he himself had caught some examples near the coast of 

 Algiers, and the Russo-German naturalist Pallas assures us that 

 they abound, sometimes in large schools, in the Black Sea and 

 Sea of Azoff, as also in the Caspian. It is worthy of record 

 also that at an early portion of the present century some 

 fishermen of Cornwall were employed by the Russian authorities 

 in teaching the fishermen of the Russian coasts of the Black 

 Sea the manner of ordering nets in drift fishing; in doing which 

 among a large number of Herrings was found one solitary 

 Pilchard; which circumstance however at least proves the exis- 

 tence of the latter in the Black Sea. It should be remarked 

 further that the Herrings of the Black Sea are said to differ 

 from those of our own shores in the proportions of the head, 

 and in the teeth, which on closer examination may mark a 

 separate species. 



But although common, and at times abundant, on the west 

 coasts of England and Ireland, it is in by far the largest 

 numbers in those parts of the British Islands and the north of 

 Europe, where the Pilchard is rarely or never seen. Thus it 

 is known in the White Sea of Russia, and down the coasts of 

 Norway and Denmark; and on the opposite shores of the 

 United Kingdom a fishery for Herrings has been followed 

 beyond record with eagerness and success; while at the present 

 time it forms, both as regards the quantities taken and their 

 quality as food, as important a fishery as any in our own 

 kingdom, or in Europe; as also it must be allowed that from 

 the capricious motions of the fish it is to be classed among the 

 most precarious. For many of the particulars of this uncertainty 

 we are indebted to the copious treatise on the History of the 

 Herring, by Mr. John M. Mitchell; but the influences which 

 lead to the local changes in its places of resort, and the vari- 

 ations of the season, with the differences in the goodness of its 

 flesh and of the size of individual schools, appear to be matters 

 beyond the powers of human scrutiny to explain. That the 

 difference of season in which the Herring resorts to different 

 portions of our own coasts, is not immediately under the influence 

 of latitude or climate is certain, since in many cases it is earliest 

 in the further north, and in others the reverse; but on the 

 whole there is the observed regularity, that the spawn is shed 

 twice in the year, of which that of the autumn is the most 



