478 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IV., No. 94. 



over the two-wire plan, is, that if needed for purposes 

 of driving motors, or for large street-lamps of higher 

 resistance, a potential twice as high as the ordinary- 

 one is very simply available by connecting across 

 from I to III, or three times as high from I to IV 

 in the four-wire plan, etc. ; and, no matter what the 

 amount of such employment, it will not disturb the 

 balance of the intermediate lower potential circuits. 



H. M. Paul. 



ZOOLOGICAL RESEARCHES OF THE 

 SCOTTISH FISHERY BOARD. 



The Scottish fishery board has for its principal 

 function the administration of public matters relat- 

 ing to the fisheries of Scotland; but since its recon- 

 stitution in 1881 it has been endeavoring to perform 

 some of the functions so successfully exercised by 

 the U. S. commission of fish and fisheries. It has 

 recently published its report for the year 1883, the 

 second annual report since its reconstitution. In the 

 general report, a short introduction is followed by a 

 chapter on the herring. The first part of this con- 

 sists of a summary of inquiries into the natural his- 

 tory of the herring, carried out before the year 1882 ; 

 to this succeeds a summary of the history and results 

 of similar work done in foreign countries; and, finally, 

 there is an account of the researches undertaken by 

 the board since its reconstitution. The rest of the 

 report is taken up with statistics of the various fish- 

 eries, and a few paragraphs on the salmon-fishing. 



The remaining and of course much the larger 

 portion of the volume is devoted to the various ap- 

 pendices, in which fuller details are given on matters 

 discussed in the general report. Of these, Appendix 

 F describes the investigations carried out at the 

 instance of the board, while Appendix G is Mr. 

 Young's report on the salmon-fisheries. 



The biology of the herring, of course, occupies a 

 prominent place in the volume ; and in its discussion 

 there is a tendency to optimistic assumptions, which 

 are not in accord with the true spirit of research. 

 For example: the board, or its scientific committee, 

 proposes in the present autumn to deposit, on some 

 of the inshore banks in the Moray Firth, some mil- 

 lions of fertilized herring-eggs; and then, if next 

 year the said bank is visited by a shoal of compara- 

 tively small herring, it will conclude, 1°, that they 

 are the produce of the eggs deposited this year ; 2°, 

 that herring, like salmon, when about to spawn, in- 

 stinctively seek their birthplace; 3°, that the migra- 

 tion of herring is limited, and that, in course of time, 

 special varieties of herring may have been formed 

 at different parts of the coast ; and 4°, what is of even 

 more importance, that when any particular spawn- 

 ing-ground is deserted, the fishing may be restored 

 without waiting till accident brings another shoal. 

 Investigation would be a very simple matter, if every 

 experiment were as fruitful in inferences as this. 

 The board will have to prove, in the first place, that 

 the herrings, if it finds them next year, are the 

 produce of the eggs it has laid down. He is a wise 



herring-breeder that knows his own herrings in the 

 open sea. 



Professor E wart's essay on the natural history of 

 the herring forms No. iv. of this appendix. It is, for 

 the most part, an abstract of a paper read by him 

 before the Royal society of London, on the spawning 

 of the herring, and the examination of a spawning- 

 bed at Ballantrae, on the west coast of Scotland. 

 Professor Ewart observed for the first time the 

 spawning and fertilization of herring-eggs in an 

 aquarium. The process, as he describes it, is proba- 

 ably the same, or nearly, as that which takes place in 

 the sea. But it would have been more satisfactory, if, 

 when he had the opportunity, he had observed the 

 behavior of a number of male and female herrings 

 in the same tank. In his experiment there was but 

 a single female herring. The discussion of other 

 problems connected with the life-history of the her- 

 ring is not very luminous. The author concludes that 

 herring have come to spawn in spring and autumn 

 because the food of the young fry is more abundant 

 at those seasons than at others ; but he has no evi- 

 dence to show that minute pelagic animals are less 

 abundant at a given place in summer than in spring 

 and autumn. A quantitative investigation of the 

 pelagic life at a given spot throughout the year has 

 not yet been carried out, and such a research would 

 be very valuable. 



The report on the sprat-fishing, by Mr. Duncan 

 Matthews, contains a record of much good and in- 

 teresting work, and raises a question of general inter- 

 est in marine biology. A certain proportion of young 

 herring are killed with the sprats in the firths of 

 Scotland, and herring-fishers believe that this injures 

 their industry. This contention does not seem very 

 important, after such a season as the last, when her- 

 rings were so plentiful off the east coast of Scotland 

 that it was almost impossible to find a market for 

 them. But it is of interest to note the difficulty of 

 deciding whether the abundance of a species depends 

 more on the variations in its food-supply than on 

 the attacks of its enemies, or vice versa. It is pos- 

 sible, in the case of the herring, that the destruction 

 caused by all its enemies, including man, is insig- 

 nificant in comparison to its breeding-powers, and 

 that the number which reaches maturity depends en- 

 tirely on the amount of food available. 



PSE UDO-SCIENCE. 



The true theory of the sun. By Thomas Bassnett. 

 New York, Putnam's, 1884. 41+263 p., illustr., 

 1 pi. 8°. 



We nowhere find in this volume a systematic 

 attempt to arrive at legitimate deductions from 

 all the collected work of observational astron- 

 omy and meteorology ; but page after page is 

 devoted to the author's baseless speculations, 

 and to the details of such of his own isolated 

 observations as serve to confirm these specula- 

 tions, while the labors of others, not condu- 



