June 21, 1883] 



NA TURE 



177 



salmon cried about the streets of London, and that was generally 

 pickled. My son, or at any rate my grandson, whenever he 

 goes to buy fish, may be offered his choice between a fresh 

 salmon from Ontario and another from Tasmania. The fishing 

 industry being thus important and thus ancient, it is singular 

 that it can hardly be sail to have kept pace with the rapid im- 

 provement of almost every other branch of industrial occupation 

 in modern times. If we contrast the progress of fishery with 

 that of agriculture, for example, the comparison is not favourable 

 to fishery. Within the last quarter of a century, or somewhat 

 more, agriculture has been completely revolutionised, partly by 

 scientific investigations into the conditions under which domestic 

 animals and cultivated plants thrive, and partly by the applica- 

 tion of mechanical contrivances and of steam as a motive power 

 to agricultural processes. The same causes have produced such 

 changes as have taken place in fishery, but progress has been 

 much slower. It is now somewhat more than twenty years since 

 I was first called upon to interest myself especially in the sea 

 fisheries. And my astonishment was great when I discovered 

 that the practical fisherman, as a rule, knew nothing whatever 

 about fish, except the way to catch them. In answer to qaesti ins 

 relating to the habits, the food, and the mode of propagati >n of 

 fish —points, be it observed, of fundamental importance in any 

 attempt to regulate fishing rationally — I usually met with vague 

 and often absurd guesses in the place of positive knowledge. 

 The Royal Commission, of which I was a member in 1864 and 

 1865, was issued chiefly on account of the allegation by the line 

 fishermen that the trawlers destroy the spawn of the white fish — 

 cod, haddock, whiting, and the like. Hut, in point of fact, the 

 spawn which was produced in support of this allegation con- 

 sisted of all sorts of soft marine organisms except fish. And if 

 the men of practice hid then known what the men of science 

 have since discovered, that the eggs of coi, haddock, and plaice 

 float at the top of the sea, they would have spared themselves and 

 their fellow-fishermen, the trawlers, a great derl of unnecessary 

 trouble and irritation. Thanks to the labours of Sa-s in the. 

 Scandinavian seas, of the German Fishery Commission in the 

 Baltic and North Seas, and of the United States Fishery Commis- 

 sion in American waters, we now possess a great deal of accurate 

 information about several ol the most important of the fo "1 lishe., 

 and the foundations of a scientific knowledge of the fisheries have 

 Veen laid. Hut we are still very far behind scientific agriculture, 

 and, as to the application of machinery and of steam to fi-hery 

 operations, in this country at any rate, a commencement has been 

 ma >e, but hardly more. The relative backwardne s of the fish- 

 ing industry made a great impression on my colleagues ami myself 

 in the course of the inquiries of the Royai Commission to which 

 I have referred ; and I beg permission to quote some remarks on 

 this subject which are to be found inour Report issued in 1866: — 

 "Whenwe consider the amount of care which has been bestowed 

 on the improvement of agriculture, the national societies which 

 are established for promoting it, and the scientific knowledge 

 and engineering skill which have been enlisted in its aid, it 

 seems strange that the sea fisheries have hitherto attracted 

 so little of the public attention. There are few means of enter- 

 prise that present better chances of profit than our sea 

 fisheries, and no object of greater utdity could be named than 

 the development of enterprise, skill, and mechanical ingenuity 

 which might be elicited by the periodic d exhibitions and pub- 

 lications of an influential society specially devoted to the 

 British fisheries." Taking this Exhibition, the third of its kind, 

 as evidence that the public attention to fisheries for which 

 they hoped had been attained, he remarked that the conference 

 opened that day formed an entirely new feature of such exhibi- 

 tions, and expre-sed a hope that there was in them a germ of 

 that which, by due process of evolution, might become a great 

 society, having for its object the welfare and the development of 

 the fisheries of thee islands. He presently turned to the question 

 whether fisheries are exhaustible ; and, if so, whether anything 

 can be done to prevent their exhaustion. He did not think it 

 possible to give a categorical answer. There were fisheries and 

 fisheries ; but he had no doubt that there were some fisheries 

 which were exhaustible. Instancing the salmon rivers, he said 

 it was quite clear that those who would protect the fish must 

 address themselves to man, who was reachable by force of law ; 

 and that it not only might be possible, but it was actually practi- 

 cable, to so regulate the action of man with regard to a salmon 

 river that no such process of extirpation should take place. But 

 if we turned to the great sea fisheries, such as cod and herring 

 fisheries, the case was entirely altered. Those who have watched 



thee fisheries off the Lofoden Isles on the coast of Norway, say 

 that the coming in of the cod in January and February is one of 

 the most wonderful sights in the "world ; that the cod f >rm what 

 is called a "cod mountain," which may occupy a vertical height 

 of from 20 to 30 fathoms — that is to say, 120 to 130 feet, in the 

 sea ; and that the e shoals of enormous extent keep on coming in 

 in great numbers from the westward and southward for a period 

 of something like two months. The number of these fish is so 

 prodigious that Prof. Sars, the most admirable authority, from 

 whorn I quote these details, tells us that when the fishermen let 

 down their loaded lines, they feel the weight knocking against 

 the bodies of the codfish for a long time before it gels to the 

 bottom. I have made a c >mputati in, with the details of which I 

 will not trouble you, which leads to this result, that if you allow 

 the fi-h each of them four feet in length, and let them be a yard 

 apart, there will be in a square mile of such shoals something 

 like 120 million fish. I believe lam greatly understating the 

 actual number, for I believe the fish lie much closer ; but I would 

 beg your attention to the bearing of this underestimate, becau e 

 I do not know that the Lofoden fishery has ever yield d more 

 than 30 million fish in a good -eas in ; and so far as I am aware 

 the whole of the Norwegi in fisheries, great as they are, do not 

 yield more than 70 million-. So you will observe that one of 

 these multitudinous shoals would be sufficient to supply all the 

 fisheries of Norway completely, and to le:ve a large balance 

 behind. And that is not all. These facts about the cod apply 

 al-o to the herring ; for not only Prof. Sars, but all observers w ho 

 are familiar with the life of the cod when it has attained a con- 

 siderable size, tell us that the main foid of the cod is the 

 herring, so that these 120 million of cod in the square mile have 

 to be fed with herring, and it i. easy to see, if you allow them 

 only one herring a day, that the quantity of herring which they 

 will want in the collide of a week will be something like 840 

 million. Now I believe the whole Norwegian herring fishery 

 has never reached the figure of 400 milli m fish — that is to say, 

 one half the fish which this great shoal of cnlfi-h eat- in a 

 week would supply the whole of the N irwegian fisheries. On 

 these and other grounds it see ned to him that this class "f 

 fisheries — col, herring, pilchard, mackerel, &c. — might be re- 

 garded as inexhaustible, but he should not venture to say this 

 of the whole of the sea fisheries — of the oyster fisheries, for 

 example. Here, again, the operation- of man become exceed- 

 ingly important. Regarding the regulation as I" close time for 

 oysters as alone absolutely futile fir the purpose of protect i in, he 

 urged that the more logical provisions of government supervision 

 in Denmark, France, and elsewhere, were impracticable of appli- 

 cation beyond the three-mile limit of this country. It was under 

 this conviction that the Commission to which he referred 

 recommenced the abolition of all restrictive measures. In con- 

 clusion, he pointed out how heavily this question bore 01 the 

 social condition of the fisherman. Every act of legislation with 

 regard to the fisherman created a new offence'. If the c nnmon 

 welfare and the common interest, said Prof. Huxley, can be 

 clearly shown to render such regulations desirable or necessary, 

 then of course fishermen must put up with this as they put up 

 with anything el.-e — as we all put up with such restrictions. But 

 supposing that no good case is made out, supposing that regu- 

 lations of this kind are made on insufficient inquiry and based on 

 insufficient understanding of the circumstances of the case, then 

 I am free to confers that I think those who make such laws 

 deserve very much severer penalties than those who break 

 them. 



THE SCIENTIFIC WORK OF THE " VEGA " " 



'THE volume we have before us— the first of a series — 

 *■ contains the results of the scientific observations 

 made during the cruise of the Vega, and to say this is 

 obviously to indicate that it contains a rich supply of most 

 valuable information as to that part of the Arctic Ocean 

 which extends along the coasts of Siberia, which appears in 

 the shape of a series of elaborate papers on different depart- 

 ments of natural history of the Arctic regions. Several parts 

 of this volume are already known. Such are the " Reports 

 to Dr. Oscar Dickson '' written by Baron Nordenskjold 

 during the expedition, and read throughout the civilised 



1 " J-V^w-Expeditionens Vetenskapliga lakttagelser. bearbetade af delta- 

 pare i resan och andra forskare, utgifna af A. E. Nordenskjij'd." Vol. i. 

 Part 1. (Stockholm, 1882 ) 



