Abstract
AT the request of the Lancashire Sea-Fisheries Committee, I spent some time, last June and July, in investigating the various methods of shell-fish culture in use along the western coast of France from Arcachon in the south to Brittany in the north. There can be no doubt that there are extensive and flourishing shell-fish industries along the French coast, and one is struck very forcibly with the admirable manner in which the people seem to make the best of unfavourable conditions, and to take full advantage of any opportunity given to them by nature. Few places on any coast could look more desolate and forbidding than the vast mud swamps of the Bay of Aiguillon, and yet by means of the “bouchot” system many square miles of this useless ground have been brought under cultivation, and an industry established which supports several villages. Then again, the neat little enclosures along the beach at many places, carefully tended by the owners at low tide, remind one constantly of market gardening, and enforce the truth of the idea, long familiar to the biologist, and now beginning to be more generally recognised, that the fisherman should be the farmer, not the mere hunter of his fish, and that aqui-culture must be carried on as industriously and scientifically as agriculture.
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Oyster Culture on the West Coast of France. Nature 51, 162–164 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/051162a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/051162a0