3 -THE ASSIMILATION OF THE FISHERY LAWS OF THE GREAT LAKES. 



By G. A. MacCALLUM, M. D., 

 Fish Commissioner, Ontario, Canada. 



The immense expanses of water known as the Great Lakes and situated between 

 the United States and Canada, or more properly between the United States and 

 Ontario, have been, since the earliest times, among the best fishing-grounds in the 

 world; indeed, Lake Erie has been judged by competent observers as having been 

 at one time probably the best-stocked fish area known. Owing, however, to careless, 

 excessive, and wasteful fishing, that which at one time was thought to be an almost 

 inexhaustible source of wholesome fish food is rapidly ceasing to be a profitable 

 fishing-ground, and if the enterprise of the governments of the two nations consti- 

 tuting their boundaries had not endeavored to keep up their stock by propagation 

 and planting, it is almost certain that the time would already have arrived when the 

 supply of commercial fish derived from these Great Lakes would be very limited. In 

 Canada students and observers of these fisheries have not been slow in attributing 

 the rapid decline to the fact that few, if any, of the American States bordering on the 

 Great Lakes, and under whose control the laws regulating the fisheries exist, have 

 enacted a close season during which time the fish may be allowed to reach their natural 

 spawning-beds to deposit their spawn as nature intended they should, this mode in 

 former years having been found amply sufficient to keep those great bodies of water 

 teeming with magnificent fish. 



It can hardly be conceived that a nation so advanced in thought and all that 

 pertains to the best laws of modern life as the United States should have thus far 

 overlooked so important a factor in keeping up a supply of an article so valuable in 

 the economy of the nation. 



It may be stated without fear of contradiction that the United States are to-day 

 doing a greater work in the tolerably new art of pisciculture than any other nation 

 in the world, but why they should allow the main factor in the reproduction offish life to 

 be neglected is incomprehensible to many scientists. Take Lake Erie, for instance, 

 and we will grant that the fishermen of the day have reduced their business to a fine 

 art; they have, by close observation, defined the spawning and feeding grounds of the 

 different fish, also the times or seasons when the different kinds of fish, through their 

 instinct, migrate to those great breeding-grounds — migrate in myriads. Having 

 determined this, is it not surprising that they should be allowed t,o spread out their 

 engines of destruction and take in unlimited numbers fish — each representing thou- 

 sands of its kind, if allowed to live and deposit its eggs as nature intended it should? 



It may be true that fishermen and dealers will argue that it is only during the 

 spawning season that these fish can be taken in paying quantities, but that is no con- 



17 



V. ('. B. 189H 2 



