462 Transactions of the Canadian Institute. [Vol. VII. 



The Anglo-Saxon has always been a disturbing factor in the bal- 

 ance of life. Forests, game and fish all disappear with his arrival. To 

 get good fishing or good hunting no\v-a-days one must travel back to 

 unsettled districts. No one expects game to be plentiful along the 

 shores of Lake Ontario, but many people are amazed that fish are not 

 abundant in it. They still hug the pleasing delusion that if brooks 

 have been overfished, the fish hatchery can restock them. But with the 

 disappearance of our forests it is exceedingly doubtful whether we can 

 ever again, by all the help of hatchery, overseers and fish commissioners, 

 re-people the streams which have been depleted by man through over- 

 fishing and deforestation. He has upset the balance of life ; it can 

 only be fully restored by a return to primitive conditions. When game,, 

 therefore, becomes plentiful on the streets of Ottawa city, fish will be 

 equally abundant below the saw mills of the Chaudiere Falls. 



Such, at least, is the conclusion to which my experiments point, 

 notwithstanding the indisputably poisonous effects of strong solutions 

 from sawdust near the source of pollution. As I have already pointed 

 out the question of whether any particular stream is sufficiently polluted 

 with sawdust to kill fish life is simply the question of determining 

 whether enough sawdust is passed into the stream to poison its waters. 

 The forestry engineer will soon be trained to determine the strength of 

 sawdust solutions, and will then be able to settle this question of pollu- 

 tion beyond the possibility of doubt. 



On the Bonnechere River. 



At present, however, a final judgment cannot be pronounced upon 

 the poisonous effects of sawdust. These effects must be studied near 

 the mills and along the sawdust beds of our rivers. A three weeks' 

 study of the Bonnechere river, a tributary of the Ottawa much polluted 

 with mill rubbish, led me to modify very considerably the conclusions 

 which I had based upon my laboratory experiments. I visited the mill 

 represented in two of the illustrations of this report fully expecting that 

 not one fish could survive in such surroundings. But pike were abundant 

 for miles below the mill, and fish (chub) could be caught any day along 

 the side of the submerged driftwood. Stranger still, the fish so caught 

 lived for three hours in a pailful of sawdust water drawn from the very 

 centre of a sawdust bed. A few brook trout had been caught earlier in 

 the season just below the mill when it was running. At the date of my 

 visit, August 20th, 1902, the mill had been closed for seven weeks and no 

 sawdust was then passing into the river. 



