Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/422

394 opposite extreme presents us with Cunningham's 'Marketable Fishes' and Mcintosh and Masterman's 'Food Fishes.' For the first four decades the progress was slow. A few years of interregnum with indications of change of front succeeded. Lastly, fully another decade of rapid issue of quite a different order of fish literature, and information as to their everyday habits, breeding, &c.

I have avoided discussing, except by mere incidental reference, what influence other countries may have exerted in the production of change in our own. As a matter of fact this has been considerable. To continental and American authorities and their governmental action we are primarily indebted for many important investigations and movements in fishery questions. The Cod and Herring breeding and migration, the surface fauna, sea-fish hatching and marine laboratories, besides other matters, have often received their earlier attention, and we in this country, lagging behind, have at last only too gladly availed ourselves of their priority. Our haphazard mode and mere outcome of individual personal interest have obliged us, one is almost ashamed to say, to follow the stranger's leading. That hurry-up of the last decade, as of old, has been a matter of necessity to keep in line with the advance guard. It may be questionable if we are not yet the rear guard in some ways.

To whither we have arrived at in the study of our economic Sea Fishes is best made evident in the pages of the lately published volumes of Mcintosh and of Cunningham, respectively the product of the St. Andrews (Gatty) and of the Plymouth Marine Laboratories. The authors, while having been active workers themselves in the subjects under consideration, yet avow that their form of book production is but intended as a summary of the most recent and important scientific investigations, otherwise scattered through many British and Foreign Transactions, journals, periodicals, &c.