er or skipper. The very animals catch
the infection, and dogs, cows, and bears eat fish. Fish manures the
fields. Fish, too, is the main-spring of the history of Newfoundland,
and split and dried fish, or what was called in the fifteenth century
stock-fish, has always been its staple, and in Newfoundland fish means
cod."

The principal home of the cod is the Grand Newfoundland Bank, an
immense submarine island 600 miles in length and 200 in breadth, which
in earlier history probably formed part of North America. Year by year
the demand for codfish grows greater, and the supply--unaffected by
centuries of exaction--continues to satisfy the demand. This happy
result is produced by the marvellous fertility of the cod, for
naturalists tell us that the roe of a single female--accounting,
perhaps, for half the whole weight of the fish--commonly contains as
many as five millions of ova. In the year 1912-13 the value of the
exported dried codfish alone was 7,987,389 dollars, and in 1917 the
total output of the bank and shore cod fishery was valued at
13,680,000 dollars; and at a time when it was incomparably less, Pitt
had thundered in his best style that he would not surrender the
Newfoundland fisheries though the enemy were masters of the Tower of
London. So the great Bacon, at a time when the wealth of the Incas was
being revealed to the dazzled eyes of the Old World, declared, with an
admirable sense of proportion, that the fishing banks of Newfoundland
were richer far than the mines of Mexico and Peru.

Along the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk the codfish is commonly caught
with hook and line, and the same primitive method is still largely
used by colonial fishermen. More elaborate contrivances are growing in
favour, and will inevitably swell each year's returns. Nor is there
cause to apprehend exhaustion in the supply. The ravages of man are as
nothing to the ravages and exactions of marine nature, and both count
for little in the immense populousness of the ocean. Fishing on a
large scale is most effectively carried on by the Baltow system or one
of its modifications. Each vessel carries thousands of fathoms of
rope, baited and trailed at measured intervals. Thousands of hooks
thus distributed over many miles, and the whole suitably moored. After
a night's interval the catch is examined.

In 1890 a Fisheries Commission was established for the purpose of
conducting the fisheries more efficiently than had been the case