The Commissioners assure us that there is neither ground for alarm nor for legislative interference. The beneficent sea is practically inexhaustible. “Bearing in mind,” wrote a commentator on the Report, “how much has been said regarding the wilful destruction of spawn, it is startling to hear that nobody ‘has ever seen the eggs of soles, turbot, plaice, and other like fish after their extrusion from the parent,’ while, with respect to the finny tribe in general, the Commissioners add: ‘So far as we know, there is, with one exception—herring spawn—no clearly‐established instance of the spawn of any edible fish being raised in a trawl net or taken in any other net.’ With these words one bugbear of the sea disappears. Nature, whatever may be her shortcomings elsewhere, knows how to take care of herself here. She carries on her life‐giving processes beyond our reach, and is veiled in a mystery which even the keen observation of the present time cannot penetrate, for the Commissioners remind us that, generally speaking, ‘little is known either of the seasons in which sea fish spawn or of the places in which the spawn is cast; still less of the time which the spawn, after it is cast, takes to vivify.’ But if the spawn evades the power of man, the young fish are not so fortunate. It is unquestionable that an immense waste of fry of all kinds goes on round our coasts. The trawler, the shrimper, the seine net, and the fixed engine, combine against these little creatures, tons upon tons of which are annually destroyed. At first sight it would seem that a grave matter here presents itself. The Commissioners, however, proceed so to reason away its importance that in the end it assumes very small dimensions indeed. Starting from the indisputable fact that all animals have ‘a tendency to increase at a greater rate than their means of subsistence,’ Messrs. Buckland and Walpole go on to show that this especially applies to sea fish; and they take as an example the fecund herring. Assuming that the British waters contain sixty thousand millions of female herrings, each of which deposits twenty thousand eggs, it follows that the total number of eggs which, but for natural and artificial checks, would come to maturity is twelve hundred millions of millions—an expression which is easy to put on paper, but which the mind can no more comprehend than it can grasp the idea of eternity. Enough that these countless hordes, if compressed by five hundreds into foot cubes, would build a wall round the earth two hundred feet broad and one hundred high. The inference from such astounding figures is that man’s destructiveness can do little. He takes one herring for every half‐million of eggs, while the original stock would be kept up were only one egg to mature out of ten thousand. All fish, it is true, are not as prolific as the herring, but the argument applies to each kind in its degree, and may be summed up generally by the statement