728 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. [46] 
ful studies of the many investigators of nature and of those interested 
in land and forest culture. And these manifold interdependent human 
powers must unceasingly oppose the average uniform workings of nat- 
ural forces if a permanent mean profit would be derived from the arti- 
ficial communities of cultivated lands, or if Nature would be prevented 
from introducing again into each such territory her own communities. 
This was entirely disregarded in the case of the banks along the west 
coast of Europe. Millions and millions of oysters were taken from these 
beds, and. great astonishment arose when it was noticed that their 
productiveness had diminished. Notwithstanding that the number of 
breeding animals was extraordinarily diminished at each annual gather- 
ing, yet every succeeding year an equally large number of mature de- 
scendants would be harvested. Oystermen wish the oyster to be ex- 
empted ‘from the workings of those communal laws, according to which 
field and forest culture must be conducted in order to achieve a certain 
measure of success; and there are oyster-breeders in England who 
desire, for the entire satisfaction of their great yearly demands upon 
both the oyster-banks and the oyster-beds, that every year, during the 
breeding period, the temperature of the water should remain at from’ 
18° to 20° C., that no wind should blow, and that no storm should 
suddenly disturb the good weather, in order that none of the young 
swarming oysters may be destroyed. 
In France they expected that all of the million zerins produced by a 
full-grown oyster would grow into marketable oysters, if only suitable 
objects were provided to which they could attach themselves. It was 
thus believed that some miracle would be wrought by means of which 
oysters would reach maturity, for there existed in the water which 
passed over the beds where the millions of young oysters were laying 
not a particle more food than was brought there years before, and 
that was only enough to feed the much smaller number of oysters ex- 
isting there at that time. In Germany they desire that oysters should 
live and thrive upon changing sand-banks and mud-bottoms, and ae- 
custom themselves to the brackish water of the Baltic, and that at the © 
same time they should remain animals of the same tenderness and deli- 
cacy of flavor as the oysters of the good Schleswig-Holstein beds. Such 
desires could only be realized by means of miracles or by the exemption 
of certain single cases from the necessary workings of Nature’s laws. 
There must be an entire change in the form of our coasts and in that 
of the islands lying along them, in the direction of the mouths of the 
rivers and in the flood and ebb currents, before oysters can be made to 
thrive over our entire sea-flats. It would thus be necessary to supersede 
the natural oyster biocénose by an artificial one, which would have to be 
cultivated as farmers and gardeners cultivate their fields and gardens; 
and in order that oysters should be able to live in the waters of the 
Baltic to-day, their physiological activities would have to be so changed 
that they could thrive in water in which the percentage of salt is much 
