The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1883-06-23 00:00:00

THE INTERNATIONAL FISHERIES
CONGRESS.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S ADDRESS.

On Monday afternoon his Royal Highness the
Prince of Wales received the foreign and British
jurors who are to officiate at the Fisheries Exhibition,
and afterwards presided at the first of a series of con-
ferences arranged by the executive committee. The
ceremony took place in the conservatory of the Royal
Horticultural Gardens, a structure admirably adapted
for such a purpose.
After the reception of the jurors, the Prince as-
cended the platform, and, in the course of some intro-
ductory remarks, Bald :—The Fisheries Exhibition up
to the present moment, I think, may be considered to
have been a success (cheers). The public have evinced
the interest which they share in this great and
international undertaking, as I believe I am not
wrong in stating that not far short of half-a-
million of people have already visited it (cheers).
But to-day, when the duties of the jurors are about to
begin, we may look upon the scientific and more
important part of the Fisheries Exhibition as being
about to commence; and I beg to thank all those
gentlemen who have come forward, not only from our
own country but from different parts of the world, to
give us their assistance ; and I feel sure that their
labours will be crowned with success. (Cheers.)—
His Royal Highness- then called upon Professor
Huxley to deliver his inaugural address.
Professor Huxley then proceeded to deliver his ad-
dress, and having referred to the antiquity of the
fishing industry, said—l pass on to speak of the
fisheries from the point of view of our present pre&
tical interests. The supply of food is, in the long
run, the chief of these interests. Every nation has
, its anxiety on this score, but the question presses
most heavily on those who, like ourselves, are
constantly and rapidly adding to the population
of a limited area, and who require more food than
that area can possibly supply. Under these circum-
stances, it is satisfactory to reflect that the sea which
shuts us in at the same time opens up to as supplies of
food of almost unlimited extent. In reference to the
relation which the fisheries bore to the total supply of
food of those who had easy access to the sea he quoted
the following paragraph from the report of the
Fisheries Commis,ioners, 1866 :—" The produce of
the Bea around our coasts hears a far higher propor.
tion to that of the land than is generally imagined.
The most frequented fishing grounds are mach more
Prolific of food than the sanae extent of the richest
land. Once in a year an acre of good land, carefully tilled,
produces a ton of corn or two or three hundred-weight
of meat or cheese. The same area at the bottom of the
sea in the best fishing grounds yields a greater weight
of food to the persevering fisherman every week in the
year. Five vessels belonging to the same source in a
single night's fishing brought in 17 tons' weight of fish,
an amount of wholesome food equal in weight to that
of 50 cattle or 300 sheep. The ground which these
vessels covered during the night's fishing could not
have exceeded an area of 50 acres." My colleagues
and I made this statement a good many years ago. I
have recently tried to discover what yield may be ex-
pected, not from the best natural fishing grounds, but
from piscicultural operation.. At Comacchio, close
to the embouchure of the Po in the Adriatic, there is
a great shallow lagoon which covers some 70,000 acres,
and in which pisciculture has been practised in a very
ingenious manner for many centuries, The fish culti-
vated are eels, gray mullet, atherines, and soles; and
according to the figures given by M. Coste, th
average yield for the 16 years from 1798 to 1813
amounted to scwt, per acre—that is to say, double
the weight of cheese or meat which could have been
obtained from the same area of good pasture
land in the same time. Thus the seas around us are
not only important sources of food, but they may be
made still more important by the artificial develop-
ment of their resources. But this Exhibition has
brought another possibility within the range of prac-
tically interesting questions. A short time ago a
visitor to the market might have seen fresh trout from
New Zealand lying side by side with fresh salmon from
Scandinavia and from the lakes and rivers a North
America. Steam and refrigerating apparatus combined
have made it possible for us to draw upon the whole
world for our supplies of fresh fish, In my boyhood
"Newcastle " was the furthest source of the salmon
cried about the streets of London, and that was
generally pickled, My son or, at any rate, my
grandson, whenever he goes to buy fish, may be
offered his choice between afresh salmon from Ontario
and another from Tasmania. The fishing industry
being thus important and thus ancient, it is singular
that it can hardly be said to have kept pace with the
rapid improvement of almost every other branch of
industrial occupation in modern times. If we contrast
the progress of fishery with that of agriculture, for
example, the comparison is not favourable to fishery.
Within the last quarter of a century, or somewhat
more, agriculture has been completely revolutionized,
partly by scientific investigations into the conditions
under which domestic animals and cultivated plants
thrive, and partly by the application of mechanical
contrivances and of steam as a motive power to agri-
cultural processes. The same causes have produced
such changes as have taken place in fishery, but pro-
gress has been much slower. It is now somewhat
more than 20 years since I was first called upon to
Interest myself especially in the sea fisheries. And my
astonishment was great when I discovered that the
practical fisherman, as a rule, knew nothing whatever
about fish, except the way to catch them. In answer to
questions relating to the habits' the food, and the mode
of propagation of fish—points be it observed, of funda-
mental importance in any attempt to regulate fishing
rationally—l usually met with vague and often absurd
guesses in the place of positive knowledge. The Royal
Commission, of which I was a member in 1864 and
1865, was issued chiefly on account of the allegation
by the line fishermen that the trawlers destroyed
the spawn of the white fish—cod, haddock, whiting,
and the like. But, in point of fact, the spawn which
was produced in support of this allegation coneisted
of all sorts of soft marine organisms except fish.
And if the men of practice had then known what
the men of science have since discovered, that the
eggs of cod, haddock, and plaice float at the top of the
sea, they would have spared themselves and their fel-
low-fishermen, the trawlers, a great deal of unnecessary
trouble and irritation. Thanks to the labours of Sars in
the Scandinavian seas, of the German Fishery Com-
mission in the Baltic and North Sea, and of the
United States Fishery Commission in American
waters, we now possess a great deal of accurate infor-
mation about several of the most important of the
food fishes and the foundations of a scientific know-
ledge of the fisheries have been laid. But we are still
very far behind scientific agriculture, and, as to the
application of machinery and of steam to fishery
operations, in this country at any rate, a commence-
ment has been made but hardly more. The relative
backwardness of the fishing industry made a great
impression on my colleagues and myself in the course
of the inquiries of the Royal Commission to which I
have referred; and I beg permission to quote some
remarks on this subject which are to be found in our
report issued in 1866 :

"When we consider the amount of care which has
been bestowed on the improvement of agriculture, the
national societies which are established for promoting
it, and the scientific knowledge and engineering skill
which have been enlisted in its aid, it seems strange
that the sea fisheries have hitherto attracted so little
of the public attention. There are few means of enter-
prise that present better chances of profit than our sea
fisheries, and no object of greater ufility could be
named than the development of enterprise, skill, and
mechanical ingenuity which might be elicited by the
periodical exhibition and publication of an influential
society specially devoted to the British fisheries."
Taking this exhibition, the third of its kind, as evi-
dence that the public attention to fisheries for which
they hoped had been attained, Professor Huxley re-
marked that the conferences opened that day formed
an entirely new feature of such exhibitions, and ex-
pressed a hope that there was in them a germ of that
which, by due process of evolution, might become a
great society, having for its object the welfare and
the development of the fisheries of these islands.
He presently turped to the question whether
fisheries are exhaustible; and, if so, whether anything
can be done to prevent their exhaustion. He did not
think it possible to give a categorical answer. There
were fisheries and fisheries ; but he had no doubt
that there were some fisheries which were exhaustible.
Instancing the salmon rivers, he said it was quite
clear that those who would protect the fish
must address themselves to man, who was reach-
able by force of law ; and that it not only might be
possible, but it was actually practicable to so regulate
the action of man with regard to a salmon river that
no such process of extirpation should take place. But
if we turned to the great sea fisheries, such as cod and
herring fisheries the case was entirely altered. Those
who have watched these fisheries off the Lofoden Isles
on the coast of Norway, say that the coming in of the
cod in 'January and February is one of the most.
wonderful sights in the world •, that the cod form what
is called a "cod mountain," which may occupy a ver-
tical height of from 20 to 30 fathoms—that is to say,
120 to 130 feet, in the sea, and that these shoals of
enormous extent keep on coming in in great numbers
from the westward and southward for a period of som 3.
thing like two months. The number of these fish is so
prodigious that Professor Sars, the most admirable
authority, from whom I quote these details, tells us
that when the fishermen let down their loaded
lines, they feel the weight knocking against the bodies
of the codfish for a long time before it gets to the
bottom. I have made a computation, with the details
of which I will not trouble you, which leads to this
result, that if you allow the fish each of them fan
feet in length, and let them be a yard apart, there
will be in s square mile of such shoals something like 120
million fish. I believe lam greatly understating the
actual number, for I believe the fish lie much closer,
but I would beg your attention to the bearing of this
under-estimate, because I do not know that the
Lofoden fishery has ever yielded more than 30 million
fish in a good season ; and so far as I am aware the
whole of the Norwegian fisheries, great as they are,
do not yield more than 70 millions. So you will
observe that one of these multitudinous shoals
would be sufficient to supply all the fisheries of
Norway completely, and to leave a large balance
behind. And that is not all. These facts about the
cod apply also to the herring; for not only Professor
Sars, but all observers who are familiar with the life
of the cod when it has attained a considerable size,
tells us that the main food of the cod is the herring, so
that these 120 million of cod in the square mile have
to be fed with herring, and it is easy to see, if you
allow them only one herring a day, that the quantity
of herring which they will want in the course of a
week will be something like 840 million. Now I be.
lieve the whole Norwegian herring fishery has never
reached the figure of 400 million fish—that is to say,
one half the fish which this great shoal of codfish eats
in a week would supply the whole of the Norwegian
fisheries. On these and other grounds it seemed to
him that this class of fisheries—cod, herring, pilchard,
mackerel, &c.—might be regarded as inexhaustible. But
he should not venture to say this of the whole of the
sea fisheries—of the oyster fisheries, for example.
Here, again, the operations of man became exceed-
ingly important. Regarding the regulation as to
close time for oysters as alone absolutely futile for
the purpose [of protection, he urged that the more
logical provisions of Government supervision in Den-
mark, France, and elsewhere were impracticable of