There are two sizes of sardines caught on this coast; the smaller ones look very like anchovies, and are called _parrochas_ by the Gallegan fishermen, but if the two are carefully compared it will be found that the anchovy is narrower and has a more pointed head than the sardine; it is covered, moreover, with irregular black spots, and the head, if eaten, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The anchovy is frequently eaten raw, and it is also preserved in oil like the sardine. One result of the increased facilities for exporting fish to other parts of Spain has been a rise in the price of sardines. Whereas they could formerly be bought in Santiago at the rate of a hundred for a penny, they now sell at about a penny a dozen. In 1835, Aquiar wrote that fish was selling by its bulk and not by its weight; and even now, cartloads of sardines are used by the ignorant peasants as manure for their fields. The Spaniards as a nation consume an enormous amount of dried and salted cod: it is a staple food on fast days. This, then, is another industry in which the Gallegans might make fortunes, but at present even Galicia, where cod is so plentiful, gets her dried cod, _bacalao_, from Norway. Two millions of dried cod are annually imported to the north coast of Spain; and a Norwegian Consul, who was stationed at Bilbao for several years, tells me that a shipload of Norwegian cod unloads at Bilbao every week. I see that Señor A. Florez has been lecturing in Madrid on the enormous imports from Norway to Spain and their effect upon the latter country. Señor Francisco Ribas has found in the library of the Marquis de Mos at Tuy a most interesting manuscript book dating from the reign of Carlos III. (eighteenth century), and describing a heated controversy that went on between the Gallegan fishermen and some Catalonians, who had come to Galicia to start fishing industries there and were using a new kind of net, _xeito_, with which far more fish could be caught than was possible with the antiquated ones used by the natives. In this book there was a copy of the memorial that was sent to the King in the name of all the fishermen on the Gallegan coast, entreating His Majesty to put a stop to the use of the new net, as it was calculated to kill the spawn and ultimately ruin the trade. The Government gathered the opinion of experts on the subject, and came to the conclusion that the fears of the Gallegan fishermen were groundless; so it ended in the universal adoption of the net. I hear that a similar objection was recently raised to the introduction of English and French trawling nets.