It happens that during the past year very little new statistical material has come to 

 hand on which a report might be written regarding the distribution of the Gadoid fishes, 

 though at the same time a great deal of such material is now being collected, and will 

 probably be forthcoming, for the preparation of a report next year. Under these circum- 

 stances I have fallen back uppon the accumulated records of the "Goldseeker's" trawling 

 experiments, records which, from their bulk and complexity, have been permitted to ac- 

 cumulate and of which no account has yet been published. These records are so copious, 

 and so complicated, that it has been no easy matter to find a way of epitomising them 

 so as to bring to light even their most striking and obvious results. This, however, has 

 now been done to a greater or less extent for several of the more important fishes, and 

 I accordingly submit the following short report on these records, so far as they relate to 

 the Cod. 



The Cod captured by the S. S. "Goldseeker", 1903-1909. 



The trawling experiments of the "Goldseeker" have been chiefly conducted in the Firth 

 of Forth, the Moray Firth, and on various other grounds off the East Coast of Scotland. 

 A smaller number of experiments have been made on the Witch Ground, in the Gut, and 

 other fishing grounds of the North Sea, and also off the North and West Coasts of Scot- 

 land. We shall deal here mainly with the experiments in the Firth of Forth and the Moray 

 Firth. 



The trawling has been done with an ordinary commercial otter trawl of about lOO feet 

 headline, the cod-end, being generally, though not always, enclosed within another net of 

 much smaller mesh. The total quantity of Cod captured has been extremely large and the 

 whole catch has been measured to the nearest centimetre. 



(i) The Sizes of Cod in the Firth of Forth. In the Firth of Forth alone very 

 nearly 25,000 Cod, in round numbers, have been captured in the otter trawl, and in addition to 

 these about 2900 have been taken in the small net. Upon this large number of fish we 

 may base, by the usual Petersen method, a very satisfactory determination of the rate 

 of growth of the Cod in these waters during at least their first four years of growth. 



The entire catch from the Firth of Forth has been divided into four groups corre- 

 sponding to the seasons; that is to say, the total catches made Suring January, February 

 and March, during April, May and June, and so forth, have been added together and 



