-INVESTIGATIONS IN FORTH, 1893. 155 



those who have gone minutely into the subject, and hence have 

 been met with doubt and a desire for further information. The 

 main object of the various Royal Commissions, of the Scotch 

 Fishery Board with its extensive official ramifications and its 

 large expenditure, of the special investigations which have, 

 within the last 14 or 15 years, been made on the life-history 

 and development of the food-fishes of our shores, is the welfare 

 of the fishing industry in all its bearings. To promulgate laws 

 for the administration and regulation of this department — 

 without an adequate and practical acquaintance with the actual 

 facts of the case — would be most unsatisfactory if not disastrous, 

 and unworthy of a country in which the search for truth and 

 the advancement of knowledge are sufficient at all hazards to 

 enlist its best energies. 



The foregoing remarks have been suggested by the posi- 

 tion of the haddock in the experiments of 1893. Beginning 

 in 1886 with the fair average of 84, then rising to the high 

 average of 129 in 1887, it for five years subsequently had 

 persistently kept at a low average, indeed, in 1891 at a very 

 low average (13). There was thus a basis on which to rest 

 the melancholy pictures which for many years had been drawn 

 of the Scotch line-fishing. Here, it might be said, was clear 

 proof that the haddock was diminishing in the Scottish seas, 

 and that protection of one kind or other was clamant. But 

 nature, in the vast domain of the ocean, rises above all the 

 theories of the scientific and above all the notions of the 

 "practical" man. This year (1893) the grand total of the 

 haddock, which we were to believe had been swept out of 

 every bay and fishing-bank on the eastern shores of Scotland, 

 mounted in itself above the total of every kind of fish caught 

 in the experiments of 1886, 1887 and 1888, and was only 

 268 less than that of 1889. This single year produced in the 

 experiments as many haddocks as any five of the preceding. 

 Fishermen were, indeed, struck by the unusually large quantity 

 of small haddocks both in the inshore and offshore grounds 

 along the whole of the east coast, and which made their ap- 

 pearance in July (1893). Of this total of 12,500, or 130 per 

 haul, the highest average yet attained for this fish in these 



