64 THE BRITISH FISH TRADE. 



To make the foregoing assertion good, it may perhaps be 

 legitimate to use an illustration, which the present writer 

 has used twice before, and which has never been answered. 

 It may be assumed as a matter beyond dispute that 

 European fishermen are drawing more than 3,000,000,000 

 of mature herrings annually from the North Sea. It has 

 been proved that predaceous birds and predaceous fish 

 catch annually at least as many herrings as are caught by 

 the fishermen. Yet at the end of the fishing season there 

 is no perceptible diminution in the size of the shoals. It is 

 unlikely that one herring out of every thousand has been 

 killed : it is improbable that one herring out of every 

 hundred has been killed : it is certain that one herring out 

 of every ten has not been killed ; but, to put the matter 

 beyond all doubt, it shall be assumed that one herring out 

 of every two is killed. In that case 6,000,000,000 herrings 

 are killed, and 6,000,000,000 herrings are left alive. In 

 order to maintain the existing stock of herrings in the sea, 

 these 6,000,000,000 herrings ought, in the course of the 

 succeeding year, to produce another 6,000,000,000 adult 

 herrings, or, if half the surviving herrings are females, 

 each female herring must produce two adult herrings. 

 But each female herring deposits from 20,000 to 50,000 

 eggs. Take the lowest of these numbers. Out of every 

 20,000 eggs which the female herring extrudes, 19,998 

 herrings must either fail to be hatched, or must perish in 

 some of the earlier stages of existence. Suppose that man 

 by his so-called wasteful operations succeeds in destroying 

 8 out of the 19,998 eggs or fish, or in other words 

 24,000,000,000 whitebait, nature will still have to account 

 for the destruction of the remaining 19,990 eggs or young 

 fish. If she did not do so, the North Sea in the course of 

 a few years would become a solid mass of herrings. 



