12 LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
another for grass, and another for potatoes. That fisher- 
man did not know that we are learning how to sow fish 
as we do corn, and that we shall reap a crop in due time, 
if the fisherman will be good enough not to trample the 
rising braird under foot, nor tear up the potatoes of the 
sea when they are out in flower. To-day pisciculture is 
considered the fad of Professor Herdman and his dredging 
friends in the tugboat:—that fisherman’s grandchild will 
probably be a fish farmer, and not a fish poacher like his 
erandfather. Gentlemen, this is a great and important 
economic subject, to which the labours of the practical 
fisherman have contributed nothing. It is a question 
which is being worked out by the biologist in his dredging 
expeditions and his laboratory observations, and by him 
alone. The fisherman has done his best to destroy his 
own farm, and in some instances has succeeded too well,— 
as every man who likes an oyster knows to his cost. We 
are told that the inhabitants of this island can no longer 
be maintained by the soil. Well, then they must be 
maintained by the sea, and if they cannot get corn and 
beef cheap enough, they ought to get fish. While Britannia 
rules the waves for her ships of commerce and war, she 
must also cultivate the bottom of the sea for her children’s 
food. And that this Society will give good help in so great 
an object I do not for a moment doubt. | 
Any one who has studied carefully the progress of 
civilization must have been struck with what Buckle has 
made the key-note of his celebrated essay,—the fact that 
coincident with the progress of science in any country has 
been the progress of material prosperity and of freedom 
of thought. Music and sculpture and painting and polite 
literature, and even philosophy, may all flourish in an 
epoch when things are utterly false beneath the surface and 
rotten at the core, but the pale, clear flame of science can 
