SEA FISHERIES 129 



fishing grounds ; and (3) whether or not the 

 existing legislation was necessary. Three years 

 later the Commission reported, and their Report 

 forms an important mile-stone on the road of 

 English Fishery administration. In the words 

 of a most competent critic, " No such exhaustive 

 report has since appeared, and in none that I 

 am aware of are the conclusions deduced so 

 courageous or uncompromising." 



Since 1866 great progress has been made in 

 our knowledge of the life-history of food-fishes, 

 yet even to-day we are hardly in a position to 

 answer the questions set to Mr. Huxley and his 

 colleagues. At that time nothing was known 

 about the eggs or spawn of the food-fishes. Even 

 while the Commission was sitting, in 1864, Pro- 

 fessor G. O. Sars for the first time discovered 

 and described the floating ova of the cod, and 

 succeeded in artificially fertilising the same and 

 rearing the young. Since that date we have 

 found out the eggs of all the valuable food-fish, 

 and artificially hatched most of them. But the 

 facts about the cod's eggs appear to have been 

 unknown to the Commission. They had to rely 

 upon such data as the return of fish carried by 

 the railway companies, the current prices of fish 



