REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. XVII 



slope, there to hatch all the eggs that can be procured, and, placing a 

 portion of the young fish in the stream where they are procured, to 

 transmit the remainder to other waters now entirely unprovided. This 

 operation would be continued by removing the camps northward as the 

 season advanced until the Connecticut Kiver is reached, toward the end 

 of June, and from which the States along the Great Lakes, the Upper 

 Mississippi, and the Pacific coast would be supplied. 



The California salmon is a species which can withstand the warmest 

 regions of the United States, and is extremely hardy and prolific, and 

 its multiplication is considered extremely important. Some idea of the 

 scale on which the work of the commission connected with this species 

 has been conducted can be formed from the fact that the eggs collected 

 during the season of 1875 at the United States establishment on the 

 Upper Sacramento numbered about 11,000,000, with a bulk of 80 bush- 

 els, and weighing, with the packing in which they were transported to 

 eastern establishments, nearly 10 tons. 



In further illustration of the results that may be looked for from a 

 judicious and systematic prosecution of the work of propagating the 

 food-fishes, we may refer to the Potomac Biver, in which from six to ten 

 million pounds of shad and herring are taken during the spring months 

 alone. There is no reason why any stream in the United States having, 

 direct communication with the Gulf of Mexico, or either ocean, may 

 not be made to abound in an equal degree with these and other fishes,, 

 and in view of the aggregate of the animal food to be derived from a, 

 number of such streams, the importance of this work can hardly be 

 overestimated.* 



Another fish to which it is proposed to devote the efforts of the Com- 

 mission is the European carp, a species eminently calculated for the 

 warmer waters of the country, especially the mill-ponds and sluggish, 

 rivers and ditches of the South. This fish has been domesticated, for 

 thousands of years, and is one of the species which furnish the prin- 

 cipal food of the Chinese. Living on vegetable matter instead of animal,, 

 it can be multiplied at very little expense in 'restricted) waters. 



It is not alone to the introduction of suitable fishes into water pre- 

 viously uninhabited by them that the efforts of the Commission are 

 directed, but also toward restoring a full supply to streams where they 

 were formerly abundant. At one time all the rivers on the Atlantic 



* Large, however, as is the present yield of " herring" and shad in the Potomac River 

 it is hut a mere fraction of that which prevailed less than fifty years ago. Martin's- 

 Gazetteer of Virginia and the District of Columhia, published in 1835, states that the 

 number of fisheries on the Potomac in the previous year was 150, and that in six 

 weeks' time 22,500,000 shad and 750,000,000 herring were taken in this river. Allow- 

 ing an average of three pounds for each of the shad and three-fourths of a pound 

 to the herring, we have the enormous aggregate of 630,000,000 pounds of food taken 

 in a single river in six weeks' time alone, not including the immense quantity of striped 

 bass or rock-fish, sturgeon, and other fish that doubtless belonged to the catch. These 

 statistics, large as they appear, are corroborated by the older fishermen of the Poto- 

 mac— S. F. B. 

 F — II 



