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FISH AND GAMI.

Greek geographers, Venetian and Chinese travellers,
Portuguese, Dutch, and British officials, have all contributed
their quota, and so the literature of this subject, scattered
and polyglot, is as extensive as it is interesting. Till the
advent of the Portuguese no detailed account of how the
fishery was carried on is, however, available. Under their
rule Mannar, the centre of the industry, waxed prosperous.
She boasted extensive monasteries and sumptuous churches,
but when the Dutch captured the town in 1658 its glory
had departed consequent upon a long-continued failure of
fhe fishery.
The Dutch had several series of good fisheries, but finansially
 found the industry unprofitable owing to the oft
recurrence of unproductive years.
Repeating the experience of the Dutch, the British had
sxcellent pearl harvests during the first years of their
occupation ; as much as £310,000 was realized for the years
1796-98.
During the first thirty-seven years of the past century
fisheries were fairly regular, the only great break being the
seven unproductive years 1821-27. Subsequent to 1837 the
series of fisheries become extremely erratic, and are overshadowed
 by the lean years. Afruitfulseries continued from
1855 to 1860, followed by the isolated fisheries of 1863, 1874,
and 1877 ; then a two-years’ series, 1880 and 1881, from which
a gap of six years extends to the next series, a long one, 1887
bo 1891, inclusive. 1891 was the last fishery of the nineteenth
century, and it was but last year, 1903, that a resumption of
the industry was possible, over 41 millions of oysters being
then fished, bringing in to Government the sum of £54,431,
The value of the fisheries is very variable, ranging from
the record of £105,187 in 1814 to a miserable £584 in the
succeeding year. The quantity fished varies correspondingly,
from 44 millions in 1891 to 636,000 in 1884. The average
of the last ten fisheries is over 28 millions.
The pearl banks are situated towards the head of the Gulf
of Mannar, off the north-west coast of the Island. They
consist of a northern and a southern division. The former is
constituted of a solid phalanx of beds 20 miles square,
lying to the south of the island of Mannar; the latter, a
long line of banks—* paars® as they are termed—fronting
the coast from Kudiramali (the ancient Hippuros) in the
north to Negombo in thesouth. They cover discontinuously
an extensive submarine plateau which widens greatly at the
northern end. The seaward face of this plateau forms a
precipitous submarine cliff falling away suddenly from the
20-fathom line to several hundreds of fathoms. The bed of