82 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



measures, but I am pretty sure that in no case yet known would 

 it have been legal evidence, strong enough to cause a judge to 

 ascribe illness or death to the sewage contamination — at all 

 events that has never been tested. 



What mostly resulted from the investigations made by 

 this Committee was a crop of administrative procedure. It 

 was fairly easy for a local authority to set the machinery of 

 the Shellfish Eegulations in action : much easier, for instance, 

 than to destroy the fly-breeding refuse in its own slums. That 

 procedure involved no investigation other than procuring a 

 sample and sending it to an analyst — or at the most making a 

 " topographical survey." Even the methods of analysis have 

 never been thoroughly tested and improved. There has been 

 no recognised " standard of permissible impurity." There has 

 been no adequate and systematic investigation of the general 

 distribution of " coliform " sewage bacteria in the sea. There 

 have been restrictions, and a confusion of administrative 

 methods in the experience of which it gradually became 

 evident that the local Fishery Authorities were practically 

 impotent in the matter since their powers of regulation were 

 inadequate, while the Central Authority was impotent for the 

 same reason and also because of its want of resources. The 

 authorities that do have the necessary regulating power — that 

 is, the local Sanitary Committee and the Ministry of Health — 

 have quite a different attitude with regard to the questions 

 at issue. 



So far as this Committee is concerned it cannot be said that 

 it did not " explore every avenue " that promised escape from 

 disaster. But the result is that the shell-fisheries are decadent, 

 to say the least. Only in one part of the district (at Conway) 

 has there been any success in dealing with the matter, and this 

 success is to be traced to the outcome of scientific investigation 

 carried on by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries with 

 the assistance of the Development Commission. So far as the 



