166 American Fisheries Society 



Island — one of which I attended a few years ago — is the sur- 

 vival of the old fishery society of southern New Brunswick, 

 founded seventy years ago. 



Early Fishery Protection in Quebec Province. — In 

 the Province of Quebec, or Lower Canada as it was called, a 

 bill for protecting salmon fisheries was introduced by the Hon. 

 David Price, member for Chicoutimi, and passed by the lower 

 house in Quebec, in 1855 or 1856, but after being approved by 

 the upper house it never proceeded further. Probably the 

 clauses requiring owners of dams to provide fish-passes proved 

 fatal, lumbering being the leading industry in Canada at that 

 time. 



Fine salmon waters were very ruthlessly treated by the 

 lumberers, and Mr. Richard Nettle, a venerable and strenuous 

 advocate of fishery protection, whom I remember in the Do- 

 minion service twenty years ago in his old age, recorded in 1857 

 that Mr. Boswell, of Quebec, bought the Seigniory of Jacques 

 Cartier, with the old French rights in order to restore the 

 Jacques Cartier River by salmon culture; but as no protection 

 could be guaranteed by the Government he abandoned the 

 project. 



Richard Nettle First Hatches Salmon. — It was the 

 first scheme to hatch salmon artificially in Canada, but Mr. 

 Nettle did not drop the idea of fish culture, and later he pro- 

 cured eggs and hatched salmon in a small hatchery devised by 

 him in Quebec City, after his appointment as Superintendent 

 of Fisheries for Lower Canada, under the Crown Lands De- 

 partment. Mr. Nettle, who was thus the first man to hatch 

 fish in Canada, had a staff of ten overseers, stationed on the 

 Saguenay, the Godbout, and some Gaspe rivers, and many 

 reports were published by him, the last in 1859, which are 

 still of very great interest. His little work on the salmon 

 fisheries of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, published in 

 Montreal in 1857, is an interesting but pathetic record, for it 

 shows the barbarous treatment of salmon and trout waters 

 generally, in early days. 



