224 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW 
and cents, but to the fishermen it is generally enough to meet the few 
unavoidable cash payments, above all taxation, while it is not intended 
to cover all the necessaries of life. 
Small as is the actual monetary value of the catch, the importance 
of the skrei-fishing can hardly be over-estimated. The curing of the 
tish and its by-products gives employment to large sections of the 
population all along the coast from Stat to Lofoten at a time when 
other work is scarce. It is especially the women and bigger children 
who are engaged in making the salt cod into klipfisk, which is then 
stored in certain of the cities in southern Norway, Christiansund, Aale- 
sund, and Bergen. The export trade in the products of the skrei- 
fisheries has literally made these towns. The oldest of them, Beigen, 
has been engaged in this trade for nearly a thousand years, and for 
long ages this export was the principal means the country had of pay¬ 
ing for foreign commodities. The timber export is much younger, 
dating only from the seventeenth century, while the pulp and papei 
trade are quite recent developments. 
If this article is to be kept within reasonable limits, it is impossible 
to say much about the object around which all the winter activity of 
northern Norway is centred—the skrei itself. Much could be said 
about its remarkably constant size, varying only by 20 percent from 
year to year in its average weight of six pounds without head and 
entrails, and about the marvelous division of the sexes according to 
depth, the females keeping more closely to the bottom, thus insuring 
the fertilizing of the eggs which have to rise through the clouds of milt 
spawned by the males higher up in the water. It would be interesting, 
too, to describe the extensive marking experiments undertaken a few 
years ago, when five thousand cod were furnished with numbered 
silver buttons on their gill-covers and liberated in Lofoten and Fin- 
marken waters or in the Arctic Ocean. Recapture of these marked fish 
extended over a period of four years. By noting time and place it was 
found that the skrei travels every summer to the north and northeast at 
a rate of as much as fifteen miles a day and penetrates far into the 
shallow waters of the Barents Sea between Spitzbergen and Nova 
Zembla. It was found also that the same stock of cod inhabits the 
waters all along the coast of Norway from Lindesnees in the south to 
Finmarken in the north and intermingles in the summer on the wide 
feeding-grounds of the Arctic seas. All this belongs to the record of 
how modern science has come to the aid of age-long experience in the 
oldest of our Norwegian industries. 
