BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 87 



this fishery when requested. I have read somewhere that the detiuition 

 of the word " fisherman " is a man skilled in fishing, who proceeds to 

 sea in a vessel, and by means of an engine catches fish. The men who 

 rob me of my mussels do not proceed to sea, and have no skilled knowl- 

 edge of fishing. They also rob the country of an enormous quantity of 

 fish food, which would otherwise be caught and consumed. Taking Mr. 

 Wilson's figures that sixty-one tons of mussels will catch £2,500 worth 

 of haddocks, cod, and whiting, one thousand tons of mussels would 

 catch about £41,000 worth of fish. 



I consider that where natural beds of mussels have once existed and 

 the ground has not altered, there new mussel beds may be established 

 and cultivated; but the government must grant provisional orders to 

 persons desirous and willing to take in hand the cultivation of mussels 

 and oysters, and not allow the officials at the board of trade to prevent 

 the granting of such orders. The orders must enforce heavy penalties 

 on persons illegally taking the mollusks, and provide for the imprison- 

 ment of those people who are unable to pay the fines and costs, as the 

 greatest amount of poaching is done by the impecunious inhabitants of 

 the villages adjacent to the shore, and whose forefathers, a hundred 

 years ago, were the wreckers and smugglers of that age ; in fact, ille- 

 gally taking oysters and mussels from a several fishery should be felony. 



Mussels are largely cultivated on the Continent. The exports from 

 Antwerp for Paris alone, as recorded in the u Halles Centrales Statis- 

 tic," for the season of 1873, amounted to 7,000,000 francs (£280,000), 

 which are the produce of natural beds and scalps unimproved by man's 

 care. 



In the town of St. Valery-sur-Somme, in France, artificial breeding, 

 rearing, and fattening of mussels, upon principles akin to those which 

 obtain in ostreaculture, is carried on, and the success attained is such 

 as to be worthy of a record in the history of attempts made to utilize 

 the unbounded wealth of food lying ready to man's hand along the sea- 

 shore. Lines of wattled stakes, averaging 530 yards in length, are 

 driven in the sand close to the fair-way, just above low-water mark. 

 These les bouchots de grand flat extend over 25 acres. They serve for 

 fixing the spat, which is floated up to them by the tidal currents, and 

 constitute a collecting ground for brood, which are afterwards removed 

 into shallow tanks of about 50 acres, dug out high on the strands be- 

 tween the tide marks. They are puddled with clay and fitted with 

 sluice-gates. The salt water in these tanks is slightly admixed with soft 

 river water. They also serve as nurseries for the young mussels, which 

 hang in clusters and gather on wattles. When they attain proper size 

 for transplanting they are removed into tkejjarc, where they will grow 

 and develop into marketable mussels. All this is being successfully 

 carried out by M. Lemaire, who obtained from the French Government, 

 in 1873, leave to appropriate a small strip of 40 acres of the foreshore 

 fringing the low sandy estuary of the Somme. The success of this short 



