I take this opportunity of correcting the very common error that all fish are migratory. Some fishermen, and naturalists as well, picture the haddock and the herring as being afflicted with perpetual motion—as being wanderers from sea to sea and shore to shore. The migratory instinct in fish is, in my opinion, very limited. They do move about a little, without doubt, but not further than from their feeding-ground to their spawning-ground—from deep to shallow water. Some plan of taking fish other than the present must speedily be devised; for now we only capture them—and I take the herring as an example—over their spawning-ground, when, according to all good authority, they must be in their worst possible condition, their whole flesh-forming or fattening power having been bestowed on the formation of the milt and roe. I repudiate altogether this iteration of the periodical wandering instincts of the finny tribes. There are great fish colonies in the sea, in the same way as there are great seats of population on land, and these fish colonies are stationary, having, comparatively speaking, but a limited range of water in which to live and die. Adventurous individuals of the fish world occasionally roam far away from home, and speedily find themselves in a warmer or colder climate, as the case may be; but, speaking generally, as the salmon returns to its own waters, so do sea fish keep to their own colony. Our larger shoals of fish, which form money-yielding industries, are of wonderful extent, and must have been gathering and increasing for ages, having a population multiplied almost beyond belief. Century after century must have passed away as these colonies grew in size, and were subjected to all kinds of influences, evil or good: at times decimated by enemies, or perhaps attacked by mysterious diseases, that killed the fish in tens of thousands. At Rockall, for instance, there was lately discovered a cod depôt, about which a kind of sensation was made—perhaps by interested parties—in the public prints, but the supply obtained at that place was only of brief duration. This fish colony, which had evidently fixed upon a good food-giving centre, was too infantile to be able to stand the heavy draughts that were all at once made upon it. Schools or shoals of fish, when they are of such an extent as will admit of constant fishing, must have been forming during long periods of time; for we know that, despite the wonderful fecundity of all kinds of sea fish, the expenditure of both seed and life is something tremendous. We may rest assured that, if a female codfish yields its roe by millions, a balancing-power exists in the water that prevents the bulk of them from coming to life, or at any rate from reaching maturity. If it were not so, how came it, in the days when there was no fish commerce, and when man only killed the denizens of the sea for the supply of his individual wants, that our waters