CALIFOENIA FISH AND GAME. 61 



The only thing to mar the success of the opening was the roughness 

 of the waters of the lake, which made it very dangerous for fishermen 

 to go on the lake in small open boats. I did all that I could do to keep 

 the fishermen from the more dangerous portions of the lake during that 

 day, and persons who went on the lake in the open boats had to make 

 shore the best way they could. A great many people do not realize 

 their danger in going on these mountain lakes in open boats in the early 

 part of the season. As the weather is more or less rough and the 

 waters are extremely cold, after a person is once thrown in the water 

 he has very little chance of getting out alive, as the experience of four 

 men who drowned in Little Bear Lake on the opening day of the fish 

 season in 1916 proves. 



WHAT WE CAN DO TO PROMOTE FISH CONSERVATION.* 



By Charles Minor Blackford^ M. D. 



Perhaps no country in the world possesses more societies and 

 associations for the promotion of various ends than does the United 

 States, and yet the small success that attends the labors of these 

 organizations must attract the notice of anyone who looks into the 

 matter. In every state, in many counties and in every city or large 

 town, we find medical societies and other scientific or semiscientific 

 bodies that are trying to teach the people at large how to better their 

 physical condition, and yet in many cases, their influence is negligible. 

 It was only after the brilliant object lessons given by the altered 

 hygienic conditions in Havana and on the Canal Zone, that the mass 

 of our intelligent people became convinced that the mosquito is any- 

 thing more than a trivial nuisance and that the housefly is a menace to 

 life, although the medical societies had been preaching these facts to 

 unheeding ears for several years. When the truth was brought home 

 to the people, however, they grasped the situation, and the tables of 

 mortality already show the results of the campaign now being waged 

 against these domestic enemies. 



The reason why these bodies of learned and experienced men have 

 so small an influence on the people around them may be summed up 

 in the single word, ignorance. This popular ignorance and its twin 

 offspring, prejudice and vanity, must be overcome before any marked 

 results can be effected. Mere legislation will not accomplish much. 

 Along our special line, the conservation of fishes, there is ample legis- 

 lation — indeed in some instances there is too much— but the legislation 

 is not accomplishing its end and we should try to find out why it is 

 not doing so. Many of the laws on the statute books are not wise 

 and would not accomplish anything if they were enforced, but the 

 principal reason is lack of enforcement, and it is here that ignorance 

 and its offspring, prejudice, come into play. One of the wisest of the 

 writers on law has said that "He who knoweth the law and knoweth 

 not the reason of the law, knoweth not the law; for the reason of the 



*An address delivered before the American Fisheries Society, 1915. Reprinted 

 from tlie Transactions American Fisheries Society, December, 1915, pp. 13-18. 



