Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/464

448 as to be quite safe. It is a large number undoubtedly, but what does it come to? Not more than that of the herrings which may be contained in one shoal, if it covers half a dozen square miles—and shoals of much larger size are on record. It is safe to say that, scattered through the North Sea and the Atlantic, at one and the same time, there must be scores of shoals, any one of which would go a long way toward supplying the whole of man's consumption of herrings. I do not believe that all the herring-fleets taken together destroy five per cent, of the total number of herrings in the sea in any year, and I see no reason to swerve from the conviction my colleagues and I expressed in our report, that their destructive operations are totally insignificant when compared with those which, as a simple calculation shows, must regularly and normally go on.

Suppose that every mature female herring lays 10,000 eggs, that the fish are not interfered with by man, and that their numbers remain approximately the same year after year, it follows that 9,998 of the progeny of every female must be destroyed before they reach maturity. For, if more than two out of the 10,000 escape destruction, the number of herrings will be proportionately increased. Or, in other words, if the average strength of the shoals which visit a given locality is to remain the same year by year, many thousand times the number contained in those shoals must be annually destroyed. And how this enormous amount of destruction is effected will be obvious to any one who considers the operations of the fin-whales, the porpoises, the gannets, the gulls, the codfish, and the dog-fish, which accompany the shoals and perennially feast upon them; to say nothing of the flat-fish, which prey upon the newly-deposited spawn; or of the mackerel, and the innumerable smaller enemies which devour the fry in all stages of their development. It is no uncommon thing to find five or six—nay, even ten or twelve—herrings in the stomach of a codfish, and in 1863 we calculated that the whole take of the great Scotch herring-fisheries is less than the number of herrings which would in all probability have been consumed by the codfish captured in the same waters if they had been left in the sea.

Man, in fact, is but one of a vast coöperative society of herring catchers, and, the larger the share he takes, the less there is for the rest of the company. If man took none, the other shareholders would have a larger dividend, and would thrive and multiply in proportion, but it would come to pretty much the same thing to the herrings.