SEA-FISHERIES LABORATORY. 75 
some fifty pages, and dealing at first with a very narrow 
range of fisheries investigation, the work of the scientific 
staff has so increased under our present Chairman, and 
with the help of the Scientific Sub-Committee, that it 
requires for adequate expression both a small Quarterly 
Report and a large Annual Report which has now 
increased to an illustrated volume of from 300 to 400 pages, 
taking the last three years as an example. The sections 
of this report are now written not by one, but by half a 
dozen different biologists, several of whom are volunteer 
workers. In fact, it is a remarkable feature of sea- 
fisheries research in this country that so much of it has 
been, and is being, done by scientific men who are not 
paid to do it, and that local sea-fisheries committees on 
some parts of the coast of England and Wales have been 
found willing to organise and subsidise the necessary 
series of investigations year after year without any help 
from the Imperial Treasury. There is reason to hope 
that this anomalous state of affairs will soon cease, and 
that Government subsidies, meeting the whole, or even 
only a portion, of the investigations will be given to all 
parts of the coast alike. Lancashire has been the pioneer 
county in the work of sea-fisheries investigation, and 
has practically undertaken unaided the work of the 
country so far as concerns the eastern half of the Irish 
Sea; and has carried out efficiently, by means of local 
funds supplemented by volunteer unpaid work, what is 
done in the English Channel to the South, in Scottish 
waters to the North, and off the Irish coasts opposite by 
steamers and investigators supported by Government 
funds. The claim of Lancashire to similar support is 
surely not only just but also strong. 
In the present report Mr. Andrew Scott supplies the 
usual account of the hatching of edible flat fish (plaice 
