president's address. 27 



Oceanography has many practical applications — chiefly, but by no 

 means wholly, on the biological side. The great fishing industries of 

 the world deal with living organisms, of which all the vital activities 

 and the inter-relations with the environment are matters of scientific 

 investio'ation. Aquiculture is as susceptible of scientific treatment as 

 agriculture can be; and the fisherman who has been in the past too 

 much the nomad and the hunter — if not, indeed, the devastating raider — 

 must become in the future the settled farmer of the sea if his harvest 

 is to be less precarious. Perhaps the nearest approach to cultivation 

 of a marine product, and of the fisherman reaping what he has actually 

 sown, is seen in the case of the oyster and mussel industries on the 

 west coast of France, in Holland, America, and to a less extent on 

 our own coast. Much Jias been done by scientific men for these and 

 other similar coastal fisheries since the days when Professor Coste 

 in France in 1859 introduced oysters from the Scottish oyster-beds to 

 start the great industry at Arcachon and elsewhere. Now we buy 

 back the descendants of our own oysters from the French ostreicul- 

 turists to replenish our depleted beds. 



It is no small matter to have introduced a new and important food- 

 fisli to the markets of the world. The remarkable deep-water ' tile- 

 fish,' new to science and described as Lopholatilus ch^ni(Eleonticeps, 

 was discovered in 1879 by one of the United States fishing schooners 

 to the south of Nantucket, near the 100-fathom line. Several thousand 

 pounds weight were caught, and the matter was duly investigated by 

 the United States Fish Commission. For a couple of years after that 

 the fish was brought to market in quantity, and then something unusual 

 happened at the bottom of the sea, and in 1882 millions of dead tile- 

 fish were found floating on the surface over an area of thousands of 

 square miles. The schooner Navarino sailed for two days and a night 

 through at least 150 miles of sea, thickly covered as far as the eye 

 could reach with dead fish, estimated at 256,000 to the square mile. 

 The Fish Commission sent a vessel to fish systematically over the 

 grounds known as the ' Gulf Stream slope,' where the tile-fish had 

 been so abundant during the two previous years, but she did not catch 

 a single fish, and the associated sub-tropical invertebrate fauna was 

 also practically obliterated. 



This wholesale destruction was attributed by the American oceano- 

 graphers to a sudden change in the temperatm-e of the water at the 

 bottom, due in all probability to a withdrawal southwards of the warm 

 Gulf Stream water and a flooding of the area by the cold Labrador 

 current. 



I am indebted to Dr. C. H. Townsend, Director of the celebrated 

 New York Aquarium, for the latest information in regard to the 



