172 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



What then is to be said of the interpretation of the 

 results of the analysis of shell-fish which may have been 

 taken from the sea some six days before the date of the 

 sampling, and which may have been stored in insanitary 

 conditions in the meantime ? The discovery of pathogenic 

 organisms in such shell-fish might indeed be conclusive 

 proof of the origin of a disease or epidemic, but the 

 tracing of the latter to the part of the sea from which the 

 shell-fish were alleged to have come might be erroneous. 

 It is surely unfair to condemn a locality on the results of 

 such an analysis made perhaps on moribund animals in 

 which partial decomposition may have begun." 



After the first few years of work (1895-99) in which 

 Sir Hubert Boyce had collaborated, the Lancashire Sea- 

 Fisheries investigations were left entirely to the Fisheries 

 Laboratory in the Zoological Department, and the 

 bacteriology of the shell-fish beds from this time onward 

 has been in the hands of Mr. James Johnstone, B.Sc, 

 under my general direction — and the practical work, both 

 on the shore and in the laboratory, has always been 

 carried out by Mr. Johnstone or under his personal super- 

 vision. Most of the Annual Reports on our Scientific 

 Fisheries investigations for the last ten years contain 

 papers on the bacteriology of the local shell-fish beds by 

 Mr. Johnstone, and in addition he has carried out other 

 inspections of suspected localities which led to private 

 reports to the Committee not published in our Annual 

 volume. All the " beds " and " layings " in the district 

 have been surveyed and charted, every sewer outfall has 

 been examined with respect to its influence on adjacent 

 shell-fish, and systematic bacteriological analysis has been 

 carried on every year. This constitutes a considerable 

 mass of scientific work which has caused the Lancashire 

 shell-fish beds to become better known bacteriologically 



