president’s address 
7 
erroneous notions have been dispelled on many matters, even 
though fuller knowledge is required before durable conclusions 
can be substituted in their place. 
The one thing which our laboratories could not supply was 
a detailed knowledge of the off-shore fishing grounds ; for 
that was a matter, as Professor Herdman has aptly expressed 
it, of “ ships, and men, and work at sea,” and consequently 
beyond the normal resources of our existing institutions. 
Yet without that knowledge much of the information that had 
already been acquired was of little use in its bearings upon 
the broader problems of practical importance. The facts stood 
isolated : the intermediate links were missing. And confront- 
ing the idea of a serious exploration lay the hard obstacle 
which the mere size of the sea opposed ; what could a single 
ship do in an area so large ? “ A great deal ” would be a 
fairly correct answer under certain circumstances, but a better 
solution has been furnished by the actual progress of events. 
More accustomed than Englishmen to international enter- 
prise, the continental investigators were the first to suggest 
international co-operation as a means of coping with the 
practical difficulties of a systematic survey of the North Sea. 
For hydrographical purposes the Swedes had already succeeded 
in 1893 in bringing about an international survey of the 
northern part of this area, and in fishery matters an Inter- 
national Commission on the Salmon Fisheries of the Rhine 
had for a number of years accustomed the representatives of 
various countries to act together for the advancement of 
a common aim. In 1893 an English Parliamentary Committee 
urgently recommended international treatment of the Under- 
sized Fish question ; and in the following year, Dr. Heincke, 
the Director of the German Laboratory at Heligoland, im- 
pressed with the evidence adduced before that Committee, 
urged the necessity of international investigations as the only 
effective means of coping adequately with the same problem. 
These various currents ultimately fused, with the result 
that in 1899 a preliminary conference of delegates of the North 
