18 THE MOLLUSK FISHERIES 



the introduction to his " Notes on Marine Food Mollusks of Louisiana," 

 gives the following excellent account of the exploiting of natural re- 

 sources : — 



As one looks over the record of the settling of this country, and notes 

 how a continent was reclaimed from a state of nature, he can hardly fail 

 to be impressed with the reckless wastefulness of his ancestors in their use 

 of the treasures which nature, through eons of time, had been collecting. 

 In thousands of cases, natural resources, which, carefully conserved, would 

 have provided comfort and even luxury for generations of men, have been 

 dissipated and destroyed with no substantial benefit to any one. They scat- 

 tered our inheritance. Such knowledge dulls a feeling of gratitude that may 

 be due to them for their many beneficent acts, — though the truth prob- 

 ably is that few of them ever had a thought of their descendants. Men 

 seldom seem to have a weighty sense of responsibility toward others than 

 those who immediately follow them. The history of the prodigality of our 

 ancestors since their occupation of this great continent has not fully been 

 written, — and it should be, in such a way that the present generation 

 might know it; for sometimes it seems as if the present generation were as 

 criminally careless of the natural resources that remain to it as were any 

 of those that are gone. Perhaps it is hardly that. We have learned some 

 wisdom from the past, because our attention has recently been drawn to the 

 fact of the annihilation of several former sources of subsistence. Rapidly 

 in America, in recent years, the struggle to obtain support for a family has 

 become more severe to the wage earner. In thirty years the increasing 

 fierceness of competition has resulted in a revolution of business methods. 

 In every profession and in every line of business only the most capable are 

 able to obtain what the mediocre received for their honest labor in the last 

 generation. 



But it is easier to condemn the past for its failures than to recognize 

 and condemn those of our own generation. The average man really has a 

 blind and unreasoning faith in his own time, and to laud only its suc- 

 cesses is to be applauded as an optimist. In the present stage of our 

 national life we certainly have no room for the pessimist, who is merely a 

 dyspeptic faultfinder; nor for the optimist, who blinds his eyes to our faults 

 and mistakes, and so fails to read their priceless lessons. Instead, our in- 

 telligence, as a race, has reached that degree of development which should 

 give it the courage to consider " things as they are." 



Considering things as they are, we must admit that we are not realizing 

 our obligations to future generations in many of the ways in which we are 

 misusing our natural resources. This waste is often deliberate, though usu- 

 ally due to the notion that nature's supplies, especially of living organisms, 

 are limitless. The waste of 70 or 80 per cent, in lumbering the Oregon 

 " big trees," and the clean sweep of the Louisiana pine, now in progress, is 

 deliberately calculated destruction for present gain, — and the future may 

 take care of itself. In making millionaires of a very few men, most of 

 whom are still living, a large part of the lower peninsula of Michigan was 

 made a hopeless desert. To "cut and come again" is not a part of the 

 moral codes of such men. It seems to mean sacrifice; and yet they are woe- 

 fully mistaken, even in that. 



But most often, no doubt, the extinction of useful animals and plants, 



