398 OUR FISHES AND THEIR ENEMIES—AMBROSE. 
and the remainder to be carted ashore for manure. Not satisfied 
with this destruction of captured fish, an ingenious method has 
been discovered of breaking up and expelling the schools of fish 
swimming outside the weirs and near the spawning-grounds. 
Boats, carrying torches of oakum, saturated with kerosene oil, 
are to be seen any dark night in the fishing season in front of the 
Town of Digby, and in other parts of the Basin, catching with 
dip-nets the herring attracted to the boat by the light. Kero- 
sene oil, abominable to the fish, dropping from the torches on the 
water drives away the fish, and, though but recently introduced, 
has already greatly injured the once famous Digby herring 
fishery. 
Brush weirs have in like manner wrought much injury to the 
shad and gaspereaux fishery by their indiscriminate slaughter of 
the young as well as the mature fish. A net-weir, on the con- 
trary, having the size of its meshes regulated and enforced by 
law, captures only the mature fish, leaving the rest to grow and 
multiply. Even net weirs should be kept open a certain number 
of times in each week—not less than five—to permit the gravid 
fish to ascend the rivers to spawn. 
Outside the mouths of harbours, the purse-seine used within 
the three-mile limit by our own people, and outside of it by the 
Americans, is the means of destroying all fish captured by its use, 
except those sought by its owners, viz., mackerel, for large quan- 
ties of herring and other fish are killed and cast away. . Purse 
seines, also, break up the schooling of mackerel and prevent their 
trimming the shore. 
Another very injurious implement of fishing is the bag-net, 
enclosing, as it does, not only food-fishes, but many other species 
not used for human food, but very attractive as bait to line fish. 
The “lump fish,” for example, boiled for the pigs by fishermen, 
are nevertheless, when not captured by bag-nets, very prolitic de- 
positors of large-sized spawn, eargerly sought for by line fish. 
Indeed, to mill-dams and sawdust in the stream, bag-nets and 
‘brush-weirs in the coves and harbours, and purse-seines and 
trawls, or bultow lines outside, may be fairly attributed the re- 
markable failure of our shore fisheries-in recent years. 
