THE PRIME ESSENTIAL IN COMMERCIAL FISH 

 CONSERVATION. 



By William K. Mollan, 

 President. Connecticut Fish and Game Commission. 



It is perhaps inevitable, it certainly is desirable, that devotees 

 of the cause of fish conservation should become specialists; that 

 each, having had his attention directed to some one outstanding 

 subject among the many into which the general problem may be 

 divided, should follow that particular branch of piscatorial 

 research to the end, giving to its minutest ramifications the full 

 of his thoughts. It is only by such absorbed devotion of the 

 individual to one or another department of any science that that 

 science attains to complete development; and the preservation 

 and enhancement of fish life is a scientific field comparable with 

 the best. 



What the American Fisheries Society, the country and the 

 world owe to those gentlemen who have devoted the thought and 

 labor of their lives to the development of cold facts concerning 

 the pollution of our waters, it is impossible to over-estimate; 

 what is owed to the painstaking research of the students of fish 

 habits we can never calculate, and the limitless patience and 

 perseverance of the experimenters in artificial propagation have 

 placed the world under heavy obligation to them. 



It is only through the assemblage of the fruits of such specialized 

 endeavor into a grand total of knowledge of the general subject 

 that this Society finds itself in possession of a balanced mass of 

 demonstrable facts and figures. It is only because one man has 

 given his life to one department of research and another has 

 followed a different line of investigation and still another a third, 

 that the sum of available information is so much greater and more 

 varied than any single individual has been able to find out for 

 himself. 



To the specialist, then, to the man who rides his particular 

 hobby hard, to the individual who allows himself no leeway, but 

 confines his labors to the development of a single-track idea, the 



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