WEEKLY DLEUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
“To the solid ground 
Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye.’”.—Worpsworti. 
THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 1912. 
SEA FISHERIES. 
their Treasures and Toilers. By 
Prof. Marcel A. MHérubel. Translated by 
Bernard Miall. Pp. 366. (London: T. Fisher 
Unwin, 1912.) Price ros. 6d. net. 
“THE English have long understood that the 
men of the seaboard are not foreigners, 
but of the same naticn as the men of the cities, 
the mines, and the fields.” So writes Prof. 
Hérubel in the very complimentary preface to this 
English edition of his “Péches Maritimes 
d’aujourd’hui et d’autrefois.” He flatters us 
somewhat. The heroism, the picturesqueness, 
and the more striking hardships of fishing, these 
are pretty well known; but there is little enough 
knowledge of the working, as opposed to the 
spectacular, conditions of fishing, and of the 
fisheries as a trade and an employment. Fishing, 
to most people, is the special affair of someone 
Sea Fisheries: 
else. Nor has the large amount of scientific re- 
search into fishery problems been adequately 
popularised. It has presented, as it were, no 
report to and for the general public. There is no 
good bridge between the highly technical Journal 
of the Marine Biological Association and learned 
monographs and trade periodicals on the one side, 
and unsystematic picture-books about fish and 
fishing on the other. Sharp controversies affect- 
ing the livelihood of more than a hundred thousand 
sea-going fishermen, who land yearly over ten 
millions’ worth of fish, rouse next to no wide- 
spread interest, mainly for the reason that so few 
people know enough about fishing to hold an 
opinion. 
The description given of a companion volume 
NO. 2210, VOL. 89] 
in the “Bibliotheque des Amis de la Marine” 
applies well to Prof. Hérubel’s “Sea Fisheries” : 
—‘C’est une ceuvre d’intelligente et agréable 
vulgarisation.” It is a work, too, which was as 
needed in England as in France, and although the 
author wrote primarily of the French fisheries for 
his fellow-countrymen, he has so much to say 
about the [English industry, and fishing in any 
case is so international, that he has produced 
what is certainly the best book up to the present 
for giving English readers some precise under- 
standing of their own great fisheries. (But not 
their small fisheries; his remarks on the French 
small fishermen, merely transferred to England, 
are very misleading.) Without undue technicality 
—and it is so much easier to be technical on 
technical subjects—he is exceedingly systematic 
and comprehensive. Starting with the oceano- 
graphy of the North Atlantic and with a brief 
survey of fish biology, he works out in some detail 
the cycle of oceanic life from non-living matter 
through plankton upwards to food-fishes, and 
arrives at the conclusion that “fishing-grounds are 
regions in unstable equilibrium, when [where in 
the French] there is an encounter of two critical 
conditions, one biological and the other oceanic ” ; 
or where, in other words, the oceanic conditions, 
such as meeting currents, with a consequent 
abundance of plankton, and contiguous breeding- 
grounds and nurseries, are favourable to fish-life, 
and where, in addition, the struggle to live amongst 
fish has a favourable issue for the edible species. 
It so happens that these conditions are to be 
found together only where the sea is not too deep 
for fishing on the so-called continental plateaux. 
After considering the effect of fishing on the un- 
stable equilibrium, Prof. Hérubel proceeds to lay 
down the law on fishery problems and regulations, 
and it may be said at once that his views on these 
B 
