14 American Fisheries Society 



decays slowly. Those areas are not in condition to permit of 

 spawning and proper development of the eggs. You would not 

 expect that if you allowed such materials to fall down even in 

 small quantities over the eggs in hatchery troughs you would 

 make anything like a good report of your hatching operations. 

 The young fish are very sensitive to these conditions, and I 

 do not doubt that the reduction in the shad output of the Hudson 

 River has been most radically affected at these two points in the 

 life of the fish through the destruction of the spawning grounds, 

 that is by the covering of the spawning grounds with decaying 

 material, and through the pollution of the waters to such an 

 extent that the young fish can not find proper conditions for 

 existence. 



I hardly need to mention that such conditions are slow in 

 finding a recovery. A stream which has been visited with an 

 acid bath, or scoured with a strong alkali, one in which all the 

 life has been wiped out by a poison, such as prussic acid, takes 

 many months, if not years, for its recovery, and it behooves us 

 to establish such conditions that the initial destruction of life 

 cannot take place. 



A famous biologist who has studied carefully the waters of 

 western Pennsylvania says that those streams where washings 

 of coal have passed down them, are real deserts, barren of all 

 kinds of life, and is inclined to the view that it will take centuries 

 for their repopulation, if indeed ever it is possible to re-establish 

 even approximately the conditions that existed there before. 



Now it is a very conservative statement of the case to say that 

 this destruction of natural resources does not fall under any 

 reasonable construction, within the rights of the individual. 

 I recall the time when people were accustomed to dump their 

 garbage into vacant lots or back alleys, if not sometimes into 

 front streets, — and I am not very old. Those conditions have 

 been removed in certain parts of the country within relatively 

 recent times, and I believe I am not far from right in saying 

 that it might be possible to find places where such conditions 

 prevail even at the present time. Those are precisely the con- 

 ditions that exist in our waters. I have seen myself, as probably 

 all of you have also and that within relatively recent times, on 

 the passenger boats passing up and down our great rivers or along 



