2 NATURE 
[MARCH 7, 1912 
subjects are far more questionable than the view 
which he presents of oceanic life and fishery 
operations. 
In the second section of the book—and it is 
this which makes the work so unusually complete 
he deals with the human side of the industry ; with 
the fishermen as an integral part of it; with social 
life on the coast, the chief fishing ports, boats 
and gear, fishermen, profits, and distribution. 
Here his recommendations rest on a sounder basis. 
The scandalous toll taken by the middleman and 
the imperfections of transport cannot but strike 
any investigator in England no less than in 
France; nor can the fishing industry become really 
prosperous for the fishermen producers as well as 
for its horde of middlemen until its amazing 
abuses, its fluctuations and consequent gambling 
on the markets, are taken firmly in hand. All 
efforts to improve the fisheries must be more than 
futile so long as neither the fisherman nor the con- 
sumer stands to obtain any of the benefit. 
It is a point insufficiently recognised by Prof. 
Hérubel. He has apparently been misled by the 
magnitude and the huge turnover, the confusing 
noise and hustle, of the English capitalistic steam 
fisheries; so much so, indeed, that he insists on 
his countrymen adopting their methods, though 
later on in the book he seems to admit that the 
more co-operative German and Danish methods 
are even better. “For one step taken by the 
French the English take fifty and the Germans a 
hundred.” I do not observe (from his  biblio- 
graphy) that he has studied the 1904 report of the 
evidence given before the House of Lords Com- 
mittee on the Sea Fisheries Bill. Had he done 
so, he could hardly have helped moderating his 
animus against small fishermen and his desire to 
suppress them altogether; for it was there con- 
clusively shown that immature flat-fish do at cer- 
tain ages and seasons congregate on the extra- 
territorial fishing grounds, and that the destruc- 
tion of them inshore by all the small fishermen 
put together is an almost negligible factor com- 
pared with their wholesale destruction by the great 
steam fleets. It is impossible to avoid thinking 
that Prof. Hérubel’s inordinate admiration for 
the steam fishing companies has led him to take 
sides with them, and to base his recommenda- 
tions on the incomplete scientific hypotheses which 
happen to be favourable to their interests. 
As soon, in fact, as incomplete scientific in- 
vestigations are embodied in recommendations and 
regulations affecting the livelihoods of men, we 
meet with the question of fictitious accuracy in 
an acute form. An average, for instance, is not 
a substantive quantity, and is not used as such 
in scientific work; it is only valid for purposes of 
NO. 2210, VOL. 89] 
comparison with other averages similarly ob- 
tained. But when it is used in the framing of 
fishery regulations, its non-substantive character 
should be plainly realised, the more so since minor 
legislating bodies are always only too anxious to 
shelve their responsibilities on their scientific 
advisers. 
Prof. Hérubel affirms that the flounder is 
adult (i.e. can reproduce itself) at 3) in., the sole 
at 57) in., the turbot at 54 in., &c. The average 
sole may be adult at 5,4, in.; but the average sole 
is a fiction; soles themselves are adult at some- 
where about that size. Or to take a more strik- 
ing example, Prof. Hérubel states that ‘400 Ice- 
land herring will fill a barrel, while Soo Channel 
herring are required”; and that ‘the herring of 
one region never show themselves in another 
region—at all events, not in the form of shoals.” 
Channel herrings do average somewhere between 
700 and 800 to a barrel; but as a statement of fact, 
and not of average, Prof. Hérubel’s figures are 
simply untrue; last winter I could scarcely pack 
6004 of Channel herrings into barrels which, this 
winter, were not properly filled with goo. (It may 
be worth while to state that a hundred of herrings 
in Channel ports is 120 fish, and on the barrels 
a hundred and a half is written 1003.) Suppose, 
then, it were a question of forbidding fisher- 
men to catch Channel herrings on account of their 
small average size. Obviously a _ regulation 
founded on the average figures would ke as remote 
from actual fact as the much-advertised mean 
temperature of a certain seaside resort, where 
excessive heat in summer and withering east winds 
in the winter combine to produce an average tem- 
perature that would be delightful to live in if it 
ever existed there. In a like manner, by using 
averages and by exchanging terms which are not 
interchangeable, Prof. Hérubel arrives at the 
astonishing conclusion that the British fisherman 
“eains more than twice as much as the French 
fisherman.” He does not, of course. He may 
catch more than twice the worth of fish, but very 
little of the excess is actually pocketed by himself. 
Figures of fictitious accuracy, valid in scientific 
work, where they are compared one with the other, 
but not valid in their bearing on human life, are 
now so much in vogue—not only for framing 
fishery recommendations—that means should be 
taken more carefully to define what might be 
called their human validity. Had Prof. Hérubel 
done so, his ‘Sea Fisheries’? would have been 
authoritative throughout instead of authoritative 
| in its presentation, but extremely debatable in 
some of its recommendations, more especially as 
regards the small fisheries. 
STEPHEN REYNOLDS. 
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