168 THE HERRING INDUSTRY 



Walpole and Young, was given a commission 

 to inquire into the question of the destruction 

 of the spawn by the use of the beam-trawl and 

 ground seine, which led to the production of 

 his Report on the Herring Fisheries of Scotland 

 and the discovery that little or nothing was 

 known of the habits of our native fish. Five 

 years later, in 1883, a grant to Professor 

 Mcintosh of the University of St. Andrews 

 enabled him to erect a marine laboratory and, 

 by studying at close quarters the habits of 

 sea-fish, to carry on the line of research already 

 indicated by Buckland and his colleagues. A 

 similar establishment at Dunbar was started 

 by the Fishery Board for Scotland (which in 

 1882 had taken the place of the old Board of 

 British White Herring) in 1893, but this was 

 moved to Aberdeen in 1900. 



The year 1883, the year of the great Inter- 

 national Fisheries Exhibition which was the 

 fulfilment of the dream of Buckland's life, 

 also saw a Royal Commission, with the late 

 Lord Dalhousie as chairman, appointed to 

 inquire into the que^stion of beam-trawling, 

 scientific trawling experiments being carried 

 out at the same time by Professor Mcintosh. 

 In consequence of its recommendations fishery 

 statistics for England, Scotland and Ireland 

 were for the first time instituted. In 1886 a 

 Fishery Department of the Board of Trade was 

 created under the Salmon and Freshwater 

 Fisheries Act of the same year, one part of its 



