32 Professor Gregg Wilson on 



Their great steam trawlers went further afield than they did a 

 few years ago. They were managing to take about the same 

 quantity of fish out of the water by fishing with an enormous 

 amount of apparatus. They had got to face the fact that there 

 was at least the danger of a very serious decline in their 

 fisheries. On the recognition of that fact there was a sudden 

 impulse to study the question of their fisheries. The Ameri- 

 cans, Canadians, Norwegians, Danes, the British, especially the 

 Scotch, had been engaged on that question, and he would like 

 to indicate to them the sort of work that had been going on 

 amongst scientific men who had put themselves to consider the 

 fishery question, and he hoped that sooner or later they would 

 do some fishery work in this district. In the first place, they 

 had been studying fish eggs and the spawning of fish. 



The most important fact discovered about the spawning 

 habits offish was discovered in 1864. That was the fact that 

 most of their food-fishes produce eggs that float. Why was it 

 that they did not see them ? Because they were like little 

 beads of glass, they were so transparent. A false idea existed 

 that the spawn of most fish was produced near the shore, 

 whereas many of the best spawning grounds were far from the 

 shore, and legislation to protect the same would require to 

 take that fact into consideration. 



He advocated the provision of fish hatcheries in certain cir- 

 cumstances only, and more especially in fresh waters, when 

 spawning ground was deficient. The Americans as early as 

 1 87 1 went in for hatching. He instanced what they had done 

 in shad hatching as an example of its success. They carried 

 the shad across to the Pacific waters. In the case of salmon 

 and trout, river hatching had been an enormous success. 

 Where they had too little spawning ground and plenty feeding 

 ground hatching was an advantage. 



Naturalists were also studying the young of fish. There was 

 the question of the destruction of young fish by trawlers and 

 others, and associated with that question was the study of what 

 he might call fish nurseries. The latter were places where 



