138 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
regard to the sea oft the North end of Ireland and off the 
West Coast of Scotland. Practically nothing is known 
of the more minute and abundant constituents of the 
plankton in the sea between the North of Scotland and 
the North of Ireland. Beyond a paper in 1896 by 
Mr. George Murray, which we shall return to below, the 
Scottish Fishery Board do not seem to have published 
any investigations in regard to plankton in their Western 
seas; and it does not apparently form any part of their 
present scheme of work. 
The publications of the Irish Fishery Department* 
do not give any information in regard to the minuter 
plankton (such as Diatoms) off the North Coast of 
Ireland and of the seas between Scotland and Ireland. 
Apparently only coarse-meshed nets have been used by 
the Irish investigators, and no Diatoms are entered in 
the published tables,f which deal with the zoo-plankton 
alone. 
Finally, the map giving the stations in European 
seas at which plankton observations have been taken in 
recent years{ shows a great unbridged gap extending 
from near Cape Wrath in the North of Scotland to 
Belfast Lough in Ireland. The whole of the seas round 
the Western Islands of Scotland, like the western coasts 
of England and Wales, have apparently been omitted 
from the Official International Scheme of investigation. 
This state of affairs is, from the scientific point of 
view, most unfortunate, as, for a complete under- 
standing of the plankton changes throughout the year 
in the Irish Sea, it.is essential that we should have full 
*There is a paper in ‘‘ Fisheries, Ireland Sci. Invest.’’ 1904, vi. (1906) 
by Gough, on Plankton collected at the Irish Light Stations, in 1904, but 
- that record does not include any observations taken further North than 
Skulmartin Light Ship, which is South of Belfast Lough. 
+Conseil Perm. Internat., Bull. Trimestriel, 1907-8, Copenhague, 
1910. 
tLoe, cit., ‘*‘ Résumé Planktonique,”’ Introduction, p. xii, 1910, 
