STATISTICAL SECTION — JULY 1905 ( 56 ) 
the meeting. The greater part of the report was also completed and in the hands 
of the members in the form of type-written copies. He was glad to hear that the 
Bureau intended to publish the report and the tables with the proceedings of the 
meeting of the Council!, as in no other way, so far as he could see, could the 
difficulties of the work and the shortcomings present in the material be brought 
to the attention of the members. He did not wish to discuss the results obtained 
and hoped the members would agree, that a discussion of the difficulties which 
yet stood in the way of obtaining approximately accurate results, would be more 
profitable. Further, the particular shortcomings which appeared in the data sent 
in could only be shown by dealing with each country separately, and as the dis- 
cussion of these would occupy too much of the time at the disposal of the meeting, 
the members would prehaps agree to tell him personally or by correspondence 
any correction they would like to have made in the part of the report dealing with 
their country. For the time being, he wished to restrict attention to one great 
difficulty, which had to be faced at the very beginning of the enquiry, namely, the 
construction of tables for the conversion. of lengths into weights. The measure- 
ments sent into the Bureau showed the lengths of the small plaice, but the stati- 
stics of each country gave in almost all cases the weight of the plaice landed. 
The object of the enquiry was to ascertain the quantities of plaice under any 
given size which were landed in all the different countries. It was necessary to 
have some means of converting lengths into weights, as the percentages by lengths 
did not agree with the percentages by weights. The material at present available, 
which dealt with this point, added to the difficulties instead of solvmg them, as 
the data were more or less different for each country. This could be seen in the 
table presented to the meeting (see Table IV of the Report, Append. C, p. 65). 
The causes of the differences in the data were then discussed by the 
members present at some length. All agreed that many factors cooperated im 
producing the differences and some even thought that the differences could never 
be eradicated. 
Dr. Kyze then pointed out, that the method of taking the measurements by 
weight was probably different in the different countries and that this was the first 
point to be investigated. 
! See Appendix C, p. 46—73, of the Procès-Verbal of the meeting of the I. C. of 21 July 1905. 
