not to fish within eighty miles of the coast of Scotland (p. 84), but which they of late totally disregarded, fishing close to the shore, in front of the houses. And while they were permitted to carry away their fish from our seas without paying any tribute, the poor Scottish fishermen had to pay tithes to the Church and the assize-herring to the crown, as well as having their livelihood damaged by the action of the foreigners. The treatises of Welwood were composed to support the claim of James to the assize-herring, and the project of the queen to monopolise the fishings, as much as to demonstrate the law as to the dominion of the sea. On one account if on no other his works deserve to be remembered. He was the first author who clearly enunciated, and insisted on, the principle that the inhabitants of a country had a primary and exclusive right to the fisheries along their coasts--that the usufruct of the adjacent sea belonged to them; and that one of the main reasons why that portion of the sea should pertain to the neighbouring state was the risk of the exhaustion of its fisheries from promiscuous use. But they will be remembered in the history of international law for another reason. The first of them called forth from Grotius the only reply he ever vouchsafed to the numerous writers who attacked _Mare Liberum_. In the year in which the work was published, he was in London as one of the Dutch ambassadors, engaged in the somewhat ironical task of defending a Dutch _mare clausum_ in the East Indies, and probably the book then fell into his hands. In his _Defensio_ (see p. 344) Grotius reaffirmed the position he took in _Mare Liberum_, with the old arguments, and with some new ones to meet the criticism of Welwood, and not without some of the customary logic-chopping and wire-drawn reasoning. He held that the Roman law as to the sea being common applied not merely among the citizens of one state, but among mankind in general, because _communis_ was a different thing from _publicus_.[638] While admitting the possibility of marking out the sea by imaginary lines, he said this was not relevant to the question of appropriation, since appropriation could not take place without possession, and possession cannot be established merely by the mind or intellect, but requires a corporeal act; otherwise the astronomer might lay claim to the heavens or the geometrician to the earth. Concerning the rights of fishery, with which the _Defensio_ largely deals, he asserts that as the use of the sea is common to all, no one can prohibit fishing in it or justly impose taxes on it. With respect to the right of the Dutch to fish on the British coasts, he cites the Burgundy treaties and uses the same arguments as the Dutch ambassadors did in 1610 (p. 155). They had the right by treaties, immemorial usage, prescription, and the Law of Nations. It is noteworthy that in the _Defensio_, Grotius, no doubt owing to the polemical spirit inciting