[61] THE OYSTER AND OYSTER-CULTURE. 743 
increases in America, the price will also certainly advance, and then 
the desire will arise to fish the banks more severely than hitherto; and 
if they do not heed in time the unfortunate experiences of the oyster- 
eulturists of Europe, they will surely find their oyster-beds impover- 
ished from having defied those biocénotic laws which have been given 
in chapter 10. 
As man has uprooted the greatest forests, so can he also annihilate 
the richest oyster-beds. In England it is now understood to be abso- 
lutely necessary that the natural oyster-banks should be regularly 
and systematically protected if they are to remain uniformly and 
permanently productive. A commission for the investigation of the 
English oyster-fisheries, which met in London early in the year 1876, 
recommended to Parliament that fishing for oysters be forbidden by law 
from the 1st of May until the Ist of September each year, and that def- 
inite limits of time be designated, during which certain definite oyster- 
territories must be allowed entire rest. During the close-time all hand- 
ling of oysters for the purposes of food should be prohibited under 
penalty of fines; yet it should be permitted, even during close-time, for 
the purposes of transplanting, with the design of preservation and im- 
provement, oysters taken in a lawful manner upon public beds. Upon 
the banks in the open sea the close-time was to last only from the 15th 
of June until the end of August, since these banks can very seldom be 
fished during the stormy seasons of the year. The size of the sea-oys- 
ters brought to market was to be at least 24 to 3 inches in diameter.* 
A close-time has been enforced upon’ the Schleswig-Holstein beds for 
along period. This time extends from the 9th of May to the 1st of Sep- 
tember, and, furthermore, no oysterman is permitted to take away any 
oysters which are less than 24 inches in diameter. All oysters which 
are not of this size must be thrown back into the water. Both of these 
laws have been carried out; yet, nevertheless, in the course of the last 
twenty years the fertility of the beds, in comparison with earlier rental 
periods, has very significantly fallen off. These laws in regard to close- 
time and a minimum size for marketable oysters, which were designed 
to preserve to the banks an undiminished power of renewal, did not, 
therefore, attain their object at the very time of the high price of oys- 
ters, and when oysters should have been plentiful. It is, therefore, 
not enough to regulate the time of catching and the size of oysters, if, 
at the same time, care is not used to prevent too large a number of 
oysters from being taken from the beds during any one fishing season. 
But what number is too great? A foundation for an estimate of the num- 
ber of oysters which may be taken away from the beds without injury 
totheir productiveness can be obtained, for the Schleswig-Holstein beds, 
by means of the inquiry in regard to their productiveness. This product- 
iveness is, upon anaverage, 421 per thousand ; so for every 1,000 full-grown 
* Report on oyster-fisheries, 1876, p. ili. 
