590 
salinity, temperature,-and current, we study the dis- 
tribution of plankton,. as it is called nowadays, the 
floating life of the sea. On his great voyage across 
the ocean, Darwin himself spoke of it as a weary 
waste of waters. It was but a few years afterward 
that Johannes Muller and others showed that every 
gallon of the waters over which we sail is a teeming 
world of microscopic life. A thousand varied forms 
people the surface waters. Some have their home 
around the shores, while others are denizens of the 
great ocean currents, and these coming more or less 
periodically within our reach, mark and render visible 
the currents to which they belong. These organisms 
are animal and vegetable, and among them the myriad 
tiny green alge play their part in the economy of 
nature, renewing in the sunlight the oxygen of the 
sea, as the green herbage restores the balance of 
oxygen on land. Some few fishes, but fishes of great 
importance, feed all their lives upon plankton organ- 
isms, and their distribution is accordingly closely 
correlated with the abundance of these. The herring 
feeds, as many of the great whales do, on the teem- 
ing shoals of small crustacea that are especially char- 
acteristic of northern seas; the pilchard, which at 
times feeds on the same diet, is said to come to the 
Cornish coasts at the season when minute vegetable 
organisms reach their greatest abundance. But in 
early life all fishes whatsoever live on these floating 
microscopic organisms, on diatom and peridinian and 
copepod, while these same organisms are again the 
nutriment, direct or indirect, of the miultitudinous 
worms and shellfish and crustacea on which the older 
fishes are in turn nourished. There is another and 
more difficult chapter still of the same story, relating 
to those yet smaller organisms, the bacteria, by the 
subtle alchemy of which the nitrogenous contents of 
the water are controlled, and which lay the first 
foundations of the ladder by which the inorganic 
elements pass into the fabric of living things. And 
lastly, among the elements of the plankton must be 
reckoned the egg and earliest stages of the vast 
majority of our food fishes. For it is an elementary 
and cardinal fact that, with the single important 
exception of the herring, everv food fish of our seas 
lays eggs, tiny, globular, and transparent, which float 
in the surface waters of the sea. The eggs of the 
herring, on the other hand (as Walker showed in 
1803, and as Goodsir and Allman re-discovered), are 
laid in sticky masses attached to weeds and zoophytes 
at the bottom. Here they are devoured in quantities 
by the haddock and other fish, and here they may at 
times be disturbed by the operations of the trawler, 
while the eggs of all the other food fishes float safely 
and undisturbed above. 
But it is high time to pass to the fisheries of the 
nations bordering on the North Sea, and to consider 
their scale and magnitude in the briefest possible 
review. 
Wherever there is sea-coast there are fishermen, 
and accordingly all the North Sea nations participate 
in the fishery; but the extent to which the fishery 
is pursued, its actual produce, and its importance 
relatively to the other sources of each country’s wealth 
—all these things differ greatly. 
Taking the last year (1908) for which statistics are 
easily available, Great Britain and the other 
five North Sea Powers bring to land some 
two million tons of fish a year; and _ of 
this great quantity Britain has for her share 
more than 60 per cent., Norway has 25 per cent., and 
the other four nations share among them 15 per cent. 
of the whole. Of the grand total catch of Great 
Britain no less than 84 per cent. is landed on the east 
coast of England and Scotland. 
The composition of the catch is very different in 
NO. 2232, VOL. 89] 
NATURE 
[AucustT 8, 1912 
different countries... 1 show you a diagram to illus- 
trate. how overwhelming is Norway’s catch of cod; 
and another to illustrate the absence of plaice from 
the fisheries of that country, the small importance of 
this fish in Scotland, its greater importance in. Eng- 
land, and its especial and peculiar predominance in 
Denmark. When we deduct our three staple fishes— 
herring, cod, and haddock—there remains less than 
Io per cent. of the Scottish catch, a fifth of that of 
Holland, a third of that of England, about half of 
that of Denmark, two-thirds of that of Belgium. 
When we translate the above catches into money- 
value, we find that six nations earn from their fisheries 
closely upon twenty millions a year (or say, 50,0001. a 
day), of which Britain takes 11,000,000l., or actually 
about 62 per cent.; and that first return is probably 
trebled, or nearly so, by the indirect earnings and 
profits of the trade. The several shares are not alike 
in regard to quantity and value; for instance, Nor- 
way, with about a quarter of the total catch, has but 
an eighth of the total money-value, for her cod and 
herring are relatively cheap; while Denmark takes 
more than 4 per cent. in money in return for a little 
more than 2 per cent. in quantity, for her plaice and 
eels are costly fish. 
But without pressing statistics further, it is plain 
that the small or even petty shares which certain 
countries earn from the fisheries are far from being 
less vital to them than is our greater share to us. 
It was common for our older writers of two centuries 
ago to attribute the wealth of Holland wholly, or 
almost wholly, to the herring-fishery. ‘‘It is almost 
wholly from the Herring-fishery,” says one, ‘‘ that they 
have raised a country labouring under the disadvan- 
tage of intemperate air, excessive Expense in main- 
taining their Dykes, and want of almost all those 
Necessaries in which we so greatly abound, to that 
Plenty, Wealth, and Power they at present enjoy.” 
And when Charles V. made his pilgrimage to the 
tomb of the man who, long generations before, had 
invented pickled herrings, he manifested a similar 
belief. If no nation be nowadays so exclusively de- 
pendent on this or any other single industry, yet we 
may easily realise that, wealth and population con- 
sidered, the two millions that Norway earns, or the 
three-quarters of a million that Denmark earns, from 
her fisheries, are, more even than in our case, of 
indispensable and immeasurable importance to the 
support and well-being of the people. 
When we come to consider the quantities of fish 
that come from the North Sea, we find that England, 
in spite of the distant voyages that some of her 
trawlers make, and in spite of the considerable 
fisheries of her western and southern coasts, still 
takes two-thirds of her whole fish supply from that 
great fishing ground, the North Sea. Scotland takes 
an even greater part, more than four-fifths of the 
whole, and Holland, whose herring fishers go as far 
as Shetland, does not go beyond, and takes practically 
the whole of her fish from the North Sea area. Ger- 
many, on the other hand, takes only half her supply 
from the North Sea, the rest coming from the Baltic, 
and in part from her Iceland and other deep-sea 
trawlers. Denmark, again, gets the bulk of her 
supply from her Baltic coasts; and Norway, whose 
greatest fisheries lie far north upon her Atlantic shores, 
takes only one-fifth of her total catch from the North 
Sea. 
Numberless methods are employed for the capture 
of fish, numberless modifications of bait and trap, 
of net and line; but for our purposes we may speak 
particularly of three only, the methods of the fine- 
fisher, the fisher of nets, and the trawl fisherman. 
In each one of these methods great changes have 
taken place within recent memory, changes that have 
i I tal am ae im 
