TECHNICAL EDUCATION FOR FISHERMEN 33 



grievances. But one outstanding fact is the extraordinary amount of 

 ignorance amongst them of their own business. I have had cases where 

 I have tried to ascertain the proportion of males to females on the 

 spawning beds at certain periods. I could not get any information on 

 , points like that. They did not use their eyes on anything outside the 

 practical points of extracting the fish from the water. The advantage or 

 disadvantage of using certain sizes of nets is another thing on which 

 there is extraordinary ignorance. In one case on an Ontario lake, two 

 men were fishing alongside one another, one with a 4^ in. mesh and 

 another with a 6 in. mesh. Nothing could make the man using the 4j4 

 in. believe that he would be better off with the 6 in., although the man 

 using the larger mesh was getting bigger and better fish and at the end 

 of his season had shipped a greater weight of fish. The man with the 

 small mesh is extracting immature fish which he should leave in the 

 water for a year or two and thus get a better product. Then, parti- 

 cularly in some of the out-of-the-way places, there are so many fisher- 

 men who are absolutely illiterate that it is difficult to know how to 

 begin. I think this is largely the fault of the elementary schools. There 

 also seems to be, at certain points, an undesirable element which is dif- 

 ficult to handle, yet I feel quite sure that, if the problems are brought 

 before them by an enthusiast, we can get great improvements along 

 these lines. 



Mr. Cowie : Just one word in connection with the teaching of 

 fishermen. As I understand it, in the European schools for fishermen 

 they are taught more of navigation and questions of a scientific nature 

 than' the actual work in connection with the use of a line or a net. For 

 instance, before I left Scotland, the Fishery Board had arranged to 

 bring a few leading fishermen from every fishing community to its 

 hatchery at Aberdeen for one week for the purpose of imparting to 

 them scientific knowledge of fish life, with a view to sending those men 

 back to diffuse the knowledge in their various communities. Again, 

 at Grimsby, Eng., they have a school for fishermen, but it is devoted, 

 I think, entirely to the teaching of navigation and probably to some 

 instruction as to the science of fish and fish life. In Germany, I under- 

 stand the schools are chiefly devoted to subjects such as wireless tele- 

 graphy, the use of motor engines in fishing boats and the use of chart 

 and compass and navigation generally. It is a very difficult problem to 

 handle the instruction of fishermen in the actual work of fishing and 

 the handling of fish. To a certain extent we have done something along 

 these lines. For instance, I have written some pamphlets in a simple, 

 straightforward way, describing to the fishermen how they could 

 3 



I 



