116 American Fisheries Society 



persons who have no regard for the rights of others. 

 The man who draws off a dam for the sake of getting 

 a bushel of fish and thereby destroys thousands of other 

 fish has no regard for the Golden Rule. The same is 

 true of the gigger and the seiner, but the Department 

 hopes, with the education of the people to the fact that 

 the streams will be full of fish if they are properly pro- 

 tected, that the days of destructive fishing will soon be 

 numbered. 



The Department is glad to say that it finds no part 

 of its work so popular as the plan to fill up the streams 

 with fish for the general public. 



The problem of clarifying the streams of Pennsylvania 

 is one of the most serious that the Department of Fish- 

 eries has to face. Ever since the settlement of 

 Pennsylvania manufacturers have seemed to regard the 

 streams as open sewers into which it is perfectly proper 

 to discharge their refuse with no thought of the discom- 

 fort to the man down stream. There are now about 

 48,000 manufacturing establishments in Pennsylvania 

 and all, or nearly all of them that have the opportunity, 

 empty their refuse into the nearest stream. The result, 

 of course, has been to foul the streams in such a way 

 that many of them no longer contain any aquatic life 

 whatever, while hundreds of other streams are so foul 

 that the fish avoid them or live in them only in very 

 small numbers. 



For two years the Department has pursued a plan of 

 notifying every manufacturer that he must comply with 

 the law which forbids running into the streams any mat- 

 ter deleterious to fish or aquatic life, so that no one can 

 plead ignorance of the law. The prosecution of sporadic 

 cases the Department has found of little value, making 

 no impression. Indeed, in one case where suit was 

 brought against the manufacturer, who was allowing 

 lime to run into one of the worst polluted streams in 

 the State, the manufacturer placed on the stand a skilled 

 chemist who testified that the amount of effluent going 

 from the manufacturer into the stream, would soon be 



