Aucust 8, 1912] 
NATURE 
Sey 
revolutionised the industry and brought far-reaching | 
Then we have another and greater sort, or set of races, 
consequences to the lives and prosperity of the fisher- | that breed in summer and autumn, and these the 
men. 
Eighty years ago there was not a single first-class 
fishing-boat, not a single fishing-boat more than 30 ft. 
long, in Scotland. Thirty years ago there were more 
than 5000 such, and our Board in its first Report 
said, even then, that there had been a revolution in 
the industry. But another and a greater revolution 
had yet to follow, for trawling was then in its in- 
fancy, and steam had scarce begun to oust the sailing- 
boat. We have now in England some 1300 steam 
trawlers, in Scotland about 300, and about 400 more 
in the rest of northern Europe. Besides this, we have 
in Scotland about 1100 steam fishing-boats other than 
trawlers—mostly herring-drifters, the value of which 
is about 24 millions of money; England has between 
500 and 600 of these, and the rest of northern Europe 
at the last statistics about 150. 
Steam and ice and railway facilities have done, in 
the last generation, for the fisheries what steam had 
done for the spindle and the loom: to the immense 
advantage of the people at large, and with the in- 
evitable accompaniment of loss to some. But in the 
case of the fisheries, the loss and hardship have been 
tempered and attenuated by the fact that the great 
herring industry has, in great measure, escaped the 
tendency to concentration, both in regard to locality 
and in regard to capitalisation. Even the large steam- 
drifters, costing more than 2oo00l. a-piece, are, to a very 
large extent, the property of the fishermen themselves. 
The fishermen remain free men; they are independent, 
industrious, and prosperous; and, speaking at least 
for Scotland, though there are fewer fishermen than 
there were forty years agg, IT think there can be no 
doubt that their prosperity as a class was never greater 
than it is now. 
Let me say a word about the herring fishery. The 
herring constitutes more than two-thirds of the total 
quantity of fish landed in Scotland, and considerably 
more than half the value of the whole; and in Holland 
the numbers are all but identical. In England, on 
the other hand, it represents less than one-third of 
the entire quantity, and about one-eighth of the total 
value. If we deduct trawled fish, and deal only with 
the produce of the less capitalised industry, the in- 
dustry of the men of net and line, then the com- 
parison becomes still more striking; for we find that 
in Scotland 87 per cent. of the catch of such fisher- 
men, and 83 per cent. of its value, are contributed by 
the herring alone. It is, and always has been, the 
mainstay of our fisherfolk. 
There are many ways of catching herring. In the 
shallows of the Baltic Sea they capture them with 
fixed nets, forming great complicated traps. In Nor- 
way, in America, and to some extent on our west 
coast, thev encircle them with a seine, after the 
manner of the pilchard fishery. But the great North 
Sea fishery is by means of the drift net, roped and 
buoyed, which forms a vertical wall, miles long, 
against which the shoal swims, and the fish are caught 
fast by the gills. Two hundred million square yards 
of netting are used in our Scotch herring fishery. 
The net is only a narrow strip, but make it into a 
single square, and it would more than cover London. 
The herring is a northern fish, but it is one of the 
most widely distributed of fishes. It surrounds the 
North Atlantic, and even extends into the Pacific, 
where it forms one of the chief fisheries of Japan. 
But even in our own area the herring are not all 
alike, but fall into several well-marked varieties, or 
separate races. We have, for instance, the winter- 
herring, that breeds close inshore in early spring, 
loving water that is but little salt; and in the North 
Sea we have several races of such herring 2¢ this. 
NO. 2232, voL. 89] 
fishermen follow throughout the year. They begin in 
spring or early summer to fish in the Hebrides a great 
herring the home of which is in the Atlantic; a month 
or so later the fleets are in Shetland, first on the 
west and afterwards on the east coast; in the height 
of summer and early autumn the Scotch east coast 
fishery is at its height, and by taking the average 
of many years we can precisely mark the successive 
dates, following each other week by week, or day by 
day, when the fishery culminates at successive points 
more and more to the southward along the coast. 
By October the fishery of the north-east coast is over, 
and the fleets are gathered at Lowestoft and Yar- 
mouth, but here the herring that they capture is of 
another and a smaller race; and in the winter-time 
yet another, but lesser fishery, occurs in the Channel, 
I show you a few pictures of the busy times of the 
herring fishery. 
The great bulk of the produce of the herring goes 
abroad, most of it by Konigsberg and Danzig and 
Stettin, to those Eastern provinces by the Oder and 
the Vistula, where even in Strabo’s time dwelt the 
tribe of the Ichthyophagi. But our own food-supply 
comes mainly from those fishes which, unlike the 
herring, dwell at the bottom of the. sea, and are 
caught, not by net, but by trawl and line. Of such 
fish the trawler brings in everywhere nowadays the 
bulk of the supply. In Scotland, owing to the growth 
of steam-lining, he accounts for but 75 per cent. of 
the whole, but in England the trawler yields us 93 per 
cent. of these so-called ‘‘ demersal ”’ fish, such as the cod 
and the haddock, the plaice, turbot, and sole: of the 
last, indeed, he gives us every one. Hence the great 
modern concentration of this industry in a few great 
harbours and markets, such as Grimsby and Aber- 
deen. I show you a diagram of the percentage of 
all such fish (all fish other than herring) monopolised 
by Aberdeen alone, which, thirty years ago an un- 
important fishing station, now provides us with about 
7o per cent. of the whole Scottish supply. 
The English trawling industry, far as it extends, is 
still busiest and most intense in the region of the 
Dogger Bank, where every square mile yields more 
than five tons of fish in a year. But this is by no 
means the richest part of the North Sea, for, measured 
by the daily catch of a trawler, the quantities steadily 
increase as we go northward; the kinds, however, are 
different, and it is the cheaper and coarser fish that 
swell the northern catch. But I can speak no more 
on this subject; I can only show you a few pictures to 
illustrate the great market of Aberdeen, where 400 
tons of fish or more are laid out every morning of 
the year, a market, however, which Grimsby still 
surpasses in magnitude. And, by the way, we had 
an average of 650 tons in Aberdeen every morning of 
last week. 
I have spoken, ever so briefly, of the North Sea 
as it appears to the topographer and the physicist, 
and of the fisheries as the economist and statistician 
deal with them, but I have said even less of the 
special studies of the biologist. He has to deal with 
and investigate, for instance, all the questions apper- 
taining to the food of fishes, to their rate of growth 
(by means of the rings upon their scales, the concen- 
tric zones of their ear-bones, and in other and more 
indirect ways); by marking living fish he studies their 
migrations and their diverse rates of growth on 
different grounds; and he inquires into the question 
of their local races and varieties, and all the complex 
problems connected with their multiplication and their 
distribution. 
In the end we come back to the ultimate problem 
of all, the most practical and urgent of problems, the 
