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recommend that the State Laboratory of Natural History * be empowered 
to investigate and determine the best means for promoting the fishery’ 
interests in the public waters and the adjacent undiked lands. We should 
hope that a practical program might be worked out that would permit 
of great help to the fisheries and at the same time provide game and fish 
preserves, usable by the public under proper restrictions.” 
Such an investigation should include problems relating to both public 
and private waters, the former comprising the river and its principal 
tributaries and the bottom-land lakes which are not protected by levees 
and are hence subject to overflow, and the latter the lakes within levee 
districts which lay too low or were in part too deep for profitable drain- 
age. There are serious difficulties connected with the utilizing of these 
last-mentioned waters, owing to the fact that they are, as a rule, mere 
mud-holes, without shallow margins and with bottoms deep with an 
almost impalpable ooze. Only intelligent experiment can show whether 
they can be so dredged as to give them bottoms of reasonably firm con- 
sistency, and whether, by adjacent excavation, fertile shallows can be 
created as breeding grounds for adult fishes and feeding grounds for the 
fry. That the condition of the river and meandered lakes could be 
greatly improved by carefully considered management as a public fisheries 
property there can be little doubt, but the problem of methods of opera- 
tion and policies to be adopted in such a case is a new one, for the solu- 
tion of which there are no precedents. As a fisheries property the waters 
of the state are an unsubdued and neglected wilderness, and the investi- 
gator in this field must be prepared to do a pioneer, work. 
* Now the State Natural History Survey, 
. 
