OUR FISHERIES 75 



Mr. Frank Cole, in the course of his valuable memoir on the 

 plaice,* which is quoted in a later chapter, mentions a catch 

 on the Lancashire coast that included, with only about twenty- 

 quarts of shrimps, upwards of 250 soles ; an even larger number 

 of plaice, all but six of them under 8 in. and the majority 

 only 2 in. ; 896 dabs, all but two of them under 4 in. ; 285 

 whiting, averaging 5 in. ; and 1 8 skate only 7 in. across the 

 body. This most destructive catch, in which shrimps, the 

 ostensible object of the haul, played a very small part, was 

 made in the month of August by a 25-ft. shrimp-trawl with 

 ^-in. mesh. Professor Herdman"!" also mentions over 10,000 

 plaice of only 4 in. at one haul of a shrimp-trawl off the 

 Mersey estuary. Such instances could be almost indefinitely 

 multiplied, but this would only take up space without serving 

 any useful purpose. What is of importance is this : that if a 

 single shrimp-trawl in the hands of scientific investigators makes 

 such frightful havoc among the undersized flat-fish on a few 

 occasions, the hundreds of shrimp-trawls in the hands of fisher- 

 men occupied in supplying the markets all round our coasts 

 are doing the same almost every day of the fishing-season. 



Let it, then, be assumed that the falling-ofF in the size and 

 numbers of plaice in our inshore waters is a proved fact. 

 Unfortunately this assumption is not far from the truth, so 

 far, at least, as many districts are concerned. The remedies 

 so far proposed may be resolved into those aiming at pre- 

 vention and those aiming at cure, and it looks almost as if 

 prevention, though proverbially better than cure in most affairs 

 of everyday life, were in this instance impossible. Remedial 

 measures are necessarily based on the nature of the evil that 

 calls for remedy, and this, in the case of our plaice, is known 

 to be the wasteful destruction of immature fish. As the plaice 

 is, particularly in the continental markets of the North Sea, 

 saleable some time before reaching maturity (corresponding 



* Report on the Lanes. Sea Fisheries Lab., 1901. 

 t Fishes and Fisheries of the Irish Sea, p. 53. 



