98 NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



All our fish commissioners of experience, both National and 

 State, are agreed that the decrease in the supply of food fishes 

 is traceable more to the pollution of waters than to any other 

 cause, and stream pollution is going on at a rate proportionate to 

 the increase in population and the development of manufacturing 

 industries. 



The effects of pollution are most serious in the more densely 

 populated States. It begins almost at the sources of streams and 

 extends to the very mouths of the largest rivers. 



The conditions v^ould probably not be so serious in their eft'ect 

 upon the supply of fresh-water fishes had not the flow of streams 

 been lessened by deforestation. With the cutting away of forests 

 and the cultivation of the land, the summer temperature of 

 streams has become higher and the breeding grounds of game 

 and food fishes covered by silt washed down by floods. 



Happily the movement for reforestation is gaining ground. It 

 is most important, and all anglers should be active supporters of 

 the efforts now being made for forest preservation. 



The pollution of streams not only affects fishing for sport and 

 commercial fishing, but the all-important matter of public health. 



The agencies at work are almost too varied for enumeration. 

 In general the pollution of w^aters is caused by sawmills, pulp 

 and paper mills, tanneries, starch, cheese and sugar factories, gas, 

 wood-alcohol, chemical, glass and dye works, oil refineries, dis- 

 tilleries and breweries, logging, smelting and mining, and by 

 factories of all sorts. To this catalogue might be added the item 

 of dead animals, which in the aggregate is an important one. 



There is also the depositing in the waters of cinders, garbage 

 and trash by the vast fleet of fresh-water steamers everywhere. 

 In addition to these sources of pollution there ispractically all the 

 city and town sewage of the country. 



With such facts confronting us there is no need of inquiring 

 why we do not get better results from our admirable National 

 and State fish cultural work. It is not merely the class of anglers 

 who are concerned — the people everywhere are becoming alive to 

 the dangers of the situation. 



The streams of western Pennsylvania, for instance, are already 

 ruined by coal mining. I have recently visited some of the 

 streams in which I fished as a boy. They are to-day little more 

 than sulphur-yellow drains of coal mines, disfiguring the fair 

 face of nature, in many cases throughout their entire courses and 

 for distances sometimes as great as the width of two or three 



