172 BRITISH FISHERIES 



that the fish which form the fishery at any one 

 place are peculiar to that place. The Wick 

 herring are a different school of fish from those 

 which appear in November at Lowestoft. It is 

 fairly certain now that the herring which frequent 

 Loch Fyne belong permanently to the Clyde basin, 

 and spawn somewhere lower down the Firth. 

 Heincke, a member of the Prussian Kiel Kommis- 

 sion, made a most laborious investigation of the 

 herrings of the German North Sea and Baltic 

 coasts and elsewhere, and showed that there is a 

 probability that, in addition to the distinction 

 into spring and autumn (or summer and winter) 

 herring, there are also a number of local 

 races or varieties, and that each of these have 

 their own spawning ground and migration paths. 

 They travel to and from the coast, visiting for 

 a long series of years the same ground, and 

 then perhaps deserting it in a perfectly arbitrary 

 manner. 



It is very probable that the migrations of fishes 

 are much less perfectly defined than our knowledge 

 at present leads us to believe. Most species are 

 possibly always " on the move." But we only 

 recognise certain broadly defined paths. We say, 

 for instance, that the eggs and larvas of plaice 

 migrate from the open sea towards the shore, but 

 it is quite probable that vast numbers of eggs and 

 larvas drift farther out to sea and are destroyed 

 because the young forms do not find the habitat 



