THE WHITEFISH PRODUCTION OF THE GREAT LAKES. 687 
You must remember that as the whitefish have decreased the means of taking 
them have increased. The mileage of the gill nets has increased, and the pound nets 
have increased, until now in places you will see 30 in one string reaching out into the 
lake, and it is a wonder that any fish have been left. We should have regulation all 
along the line—the size, number of pounds they can have in one string of nets; and 
there must be a regulation, gentlemen, that every whitefish that is taken with spawn 
must, as far as possible, be put in the hatchery; and if we can have 50 hatcheries on 
Lake Erie there is no question but what we can have a very large increase in the quan- 
tity of that fish, as shown by the effect of the 2 hatcheries on the lakes, which have 
in the last five or six years increased the catch until last year we had the biggest catch 
on Lake Erie we have had in the last fifteen years; all due to those 2 hatcheries. 
Nature has been doing as much as she could; but those 2 hatcheries have done the 
work. Mr. Downing and Mr. Clark know what they are talking about; they know 
what the conditions are; they know that the hatcheries will do the work; and that if you 
can by this means conserve every whitefish until you get its spawn and then run that 
spawn through a hatchery you will have all the whitefish in Lake Erie and more than 
it ever had before. [Applause.] 
Mr. Ketty Evans. I should just like to take up my three minutes by calling 
attention to a point in one of the papers that was read this morning, in which the state- 
ment was made that while we had a closed season on the Canadian side of the Great 
Lakes the fish in our waters were not as plentiful as they were in the waters on your 
side of the lakes, at several points. I would remind one or two of the fishery commis- 
sioners present that they have already spoken to me at different periods of time in 
reference to using nets by arranging with the Canadian authorities to allow them to 
gather eggs on the Canadian side of the lakes. Does it not seem curious to you that 
if the fish are to be found in very much larger quantities on their side they should wish 
to come to our side for eggs? That is one point I wish to make. 
The second point I wish to make is this, that if the condition outlined in the 
splendid papers read this morning is practically possible to bring about, you will have 
reached undoubtedly a Utopian condition; but on our side of the water, at any 
rate, I feel convinced that that Utopian condition of things will require a great many 
years to reach. In consequence, if this congress came out very strongly as supporting 
the general proposition that hatcheries could be depended upon entirely, and that 
nature might be ignored, it might result disastrously on our side of the water. If at any 
point in our international waters all the spawn-bearing fish can be so taken care of 
that their spawn is in no way lost, possibly the proposition of depending upon the 
hatcheries alone is the best one; but until that condition of things has been brought 
about it is a very dangerous thing to say to great nature, “We need your assistance 
no longer.” I therefore, from these points of view, urge the congress to go very slowly 
on this question of abandoning great Dame Nature. [Applause.] 
Dr. Barton W. EvERMANN. Mr. President, I would like to discuss this question, 
but I think I shall refrain. I would like to ask one question, however, which I think 
can be answered by Superintendent Lambson, of the California station. If I have 
been correctly informed, the natural spawning beds of the Sacramento salmon in the 
Sacramento River basin have been practically wiped out of existence through mining 
and other operations of that kind, so that even if no salmon were caught in the Sacra- 
mento River either for commercial or for hatchery purposes and all salmon in that stream 
were allowed to ascend to such spawning beds as they might find they would probably 
amount to nothing; they would be unable to find any suitable spawning beds, because 
those beds have been destroyed. But through artificial propagation in the Sacramento 
basin I understand that the catch of salmon in that river now is very large. Some years 
it is larger than it was ever known to be before artificial propagation began and before 
