96 
herring. 
US that he himself had caught some examples near the coast oi 
Algiers, and the Russo-German naturalist Pallas assures us that 
they abound, sometimes in large schools, in the Black Sea and 
Sea of Azoff, as also in the Caspian. It is worthy of record 
also that at an early portion of the present century some 
fishermen of Cornwall were employed by the Russian authorities 
in teaching the fishermen of the Russian coasts of the Black 
Sea the manner of ordering nets in drift fishing; in doing which 
among a large number of Herrings was found one solitary 
Pilchard; which circumstance however at least proves the exis- 
tence of the latter in the Black Sea. It should be remarked 
further that the Herrings of the Black Sea are said to differ 
from those of our own shores in the proportions of the head, 
and in the teeth, which on closer examination may mark a 
separate species. 
But although common, and at times abundant, on the west 
coasts of England and Ireland, it is in by far the largest 
numbers in those parts of the British Islands and the noith of 
Europe, where the Pilchard is rarely or never seen. Thus it 
is known in the White Sea of Russia, and down the coasts of 
Norway and Denmark; and on the opposite shores of the 
United Kingdom a fishery for Herrings has been followed 
beyond record with eagerness and success; while at the present 
time it forms, both as regards the quantities taken and their 
quality as food, as important a fishery as any in our own 
kingdom, or in Europe; as also it must be allowed that from 
the capricious motions of the fish it is to be classed among the 
most precarious. Eor many of the particulars of this uncertainty 
we are indebted to the copious treatise on the History of the 
Herring, by Mr. John M. Mitchell; but the influences which 
lead to the local changes in its places of resort, and the vari- 
ations of the season, with the differences in the goodness of its 
flesh and of the size of individual schools, appear to be matters 
beyond the powers of human scrutiny to explain. That the 
difference of season in which the Herring resorts to different 
portions of our own coasts, is not immediately under the influence 
of latitude or climate is certain, since in many cases it is earliest 
in the further north, and in others the reverse; but on the 
whole there is the observed regulai'ity, that the spawn is shed 
twice in the year, of which that of the autumn is the most 
