26 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF ABERDEEN AND DISTRICT 
duty to-day to have to record most disastrous intelligence from the Davis 
Straits Whale Fishery. ‘The number of ships this season was ninety-one, 
eighteen of which have been totally lost, many damaged besides ; and 
the whole fleet have scarcely captured as many whales as would make 
up four good cargoes. . . . Seventy-five ships have been lost at the 
Northern Whale Fishery since the year 1819, when they first attempted 
to cross Davis Straits.’ (And now trawling vessels from our ports pay 
regular visits to the one-time dangerous whaling grounds of the North.) 
These disasters and the falling off of the numbers of whales and seals 
finally brought this fishing to an end; from 1844 to 1865, ten vessels in 
all were employed from Aberdeen, and of these five were lost; the 
last solitary whaling ship sailed from the port in 1865. 
Thus the fauna, influenced now mainly by man and his doings, keeps 
changing, cut down and impoverished in some respects, in other ways 
added to in numbers and in kind, but never the same for two successive 
decades. It is a duty of the new natural history to trace in their detail 
and to interpret these fluctuations, of which we have given here but the 
crudest outline. 
V. 
THE FLORA OF THE NORTH-EAST 
BY 
ALEX. MacGREGOR, M.A. 
ABERDEEN spells granite, and the granitic soil of the North-east cannot 
boast of a rich flora. Our waysides and woodlands lack that wealth of 
striking flowers which favour a limestone soil and lend decorative effect 
to the lanes and hedgerows of southern England. It is true that nowhere 
in the south can be found a feast of beauty, such as the Dinnet Moor 
presents in July when the glory of the bell heather is the joy of the Nature 
lover and the despair of the artist. But the beauty of the bell heather is 
short-lived, and even the August brilliance of the higher moors soon fades 
to the uniform brown which is characteristic of heath for the greater part 
of the year. Nevertheless, the North-east has its compensations. When 
the wild flowers of the south are fading, and the grass of the Downs is 
withered, our countryside presents a freshness and a fairness which is a 
delight to holiday-makers seeking the quiet of rural haunts. Further, 
there are few areas which offer a greater variety of surface, from the land 
tilled by the labour of many hands to the wilds untouched by the hand of 
man, and none a greater variety of altitudes from the sea-level to the 
