CHAPTER II 



OUR FISHERIES: rUEIR PRACTICE AND THEIR 



CONTROL 



Unfortunately it is no longer possible for us to exult with 

 Yarrell (Preface to his edition of 1837) over the large and 

 constant supply of excellent food " obtained from the seas all 

 round the coast by moderate labour and expense." It may be 

 questioned whether such hopeful phrases were still applicable 

 on the publication of his second edition ; but sixty years later, 

 at any rate, neither the capital nor the labour involved in 

 supplying our markets with sea fish could be properly so 

 described. No one who has spent a night on board a pilchard 

 drifter or watched the wonderfully equipped herring-fleets 

 cleaning up in our east-coast ports would dream of employing 

 such a word as " moderate " in connection with either the 

 outlay or labour entailed. 



The reasons for prefacing the following short histories of 

 our different coast fish with a chapter on the methods of fishing 

 are two. In the first place, frequent allusion will, in the course 

 of these pages, have to be made to the means by which diflFerent 

 fish are captured, for the method often throws interesting light 

 on the life-story of the fish caught. There is, for instance, in 

 some of the Swiss lakes a small salmonoid — in fact, a degenerate 

 char — known as the " Beisser," or " biter," because it is caught 

 only by biting the soft meshes of the nets used for other chars. 

 It is evidently a gregarious fish, for a hundred or so are 

 generally caught at a time ; but all of them, without exception. 



