25 
in this building. I hope to induce some of our fisher people 
to send a supply to the fish-market here so soon as the 
season opens, which it will in a few weeks, and I think that 
with the great advantages offered here, we may succeed 
where others, under less favourable circumstances, have 
failed. Spain is running us so close in the business of 
supplying salted pilchards for the markets of the Roman 
Catholic countries, that we could easily find thirty to forty 
millions of fish for the supply of a fresh fish market without 
feeling the loss of them. This apparently enormous 
number would be a mere flea-bite out of our catch for a 
season. It would be a day’s, or at most two day’s successful 
fishing for the seines of St. Ives alone. And this brings me 
to the support of Professor Huxley in his remark, that in 
the waters frequented by the pilchard the sea, taken acre 
for acre, is of greater pecuniary value than the land. A 
seine when “ shot ” around a shoal of pilchards may enclose 
an acre of superficial water, certainly not more than two. 
It is on record that the seines in St. Ives Bay did on one 
occasion, in one day, capture 10,000 hogsheads, or over 30 
millions of pilchards, worth, over the boat’s side, £2 per 
hogshead. I do not know the number of seines employed, 
but they could not possibly have exceeded 20; but, 
supposing they were 20, then 20 acres, or at the highest 
figure 40 acres of sea yielded ^20,000 as its produce for 
one day, and each season consists of many days, and the 
fisherman pays no rent.* 
* The greatest recorded catch by one seine at one shot was made 
at St. Ives in 1868. There 5,600 hogsheads, or over 16 millions of 
pilchards, were saved out of one seine. This catch was worth between 
,£11,000 and £ 12,000. Remarks of precisely the same character, but 
differing in detail, apply to our trawling grounds, but as pilchards are 
never taken by the trawler, I only allude to this fact. 
