136 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



which might be indicated. It has been a lengthy and 

 troublesome piece of work, lasting most of the winter, 

 and over a thousand sheets of statistics have been very 

 carefully analysed. The results, I regret to say, are by 

 no means commensurate with the labour that has been 

 expended. For the majority of fishes and localities the 

 statistics are so defective or so vitiated from one cause or 

 another that we felt that no reliable conclusions could be 

 drawn. In fact it was decided in the end that the only 

 area in regard to which we had sufficiently detailed 

 information was the shrimping area at the mouth of the 

 Mersey. Hence the article on that area by Mr. 

 Johnstone and Dr. -Jenkins which I include in this Report 

 (p. 164). 



But it must not be thought that I regard the 

 time and labour which these gentlemen have spent in 

 trying in vain to draw conclusions from the remaining 

 statistics as lost because they have deduced nothing which 

 we are able to publish yet. Far from it : it has led to 

 the very important conclusion that the system we have 

 hitherto employed on the fisheries steamer and elsewhere 

 in the district is really inadequate, that the statistics are 

 not taken sufficiently often or with sufficient regularity, 

 and are not taken with sufficient detail. If this discovery 

 leads to the adoption of a better scheme (such as the one 

 I suggest below, p. 149), and to its faithful performance in 

 the future, the disappointment we have had in finding 

 one after another of the series of statistics broken by 

 unfortunate omissions* will be mitigated, and we may 

 then hope that the next decade will be so traversed by 



* Due to the circumstance that we have only one small steamer avail- 

 able for all the police and other administrative work of a large district, in 

 addition to what I cannot but regard as of still greater importance — viz., 

 the observational work on the condition and variations of the fisheries and 

 their causes. 



