Centennial Meeting. 



However, as is the case with most of the great inventions, human 

 attention was directed to the same subject much in the same 

 direction at the same time in widely-separated sections of the 

 world. Reiny, Green, and Ainsworth were practically at the 

 same point, and had not Reiny succeeded when he did, the others 

 would not have been much later. In my own writings, which 

 were intended to bring the importance of the subject to general 

 consideration, and which contained all that was known at the 

 time, now that I look at them from our present advanced stand- 

 point, I find many errors that deeper investigation has disclosed. 

 Among these short-comings, however, there is one sentence 

 which this meeting makes so conspicuously prophetic, that I 

 quote it as confirmation of the reasonableness of our convictions 

 in the past, and the encouragement that our present higher 

 anticipations may yet be fully realized: "Our first farmers 

 chopped down the forest and shade trees, took crop after crop 

 of the same kind from the land, exhausted the soil and made 

 bare the country ; they hunted and fished, destroying first the 

 wild animals, then the birds, and finally the fish, till in many 

 places these ceased utterly from off the face of the earth, and 

 then, when they had finished their work, that race of gentlemen 

 moved West to renew the same course of destruction. After 

 them came the restorers ; they manured the land, left it 

 fallow, put in practice the rotation of crops, planted shade and 

 fruit trees, discovered that birds were useful in destroying insects 

 and worms, and passed laws to protect them where they were 

 not utterly extinct, as with the pinnated grouse of Pennsylvania 

 and Long Island, and will, I predict, ere long, restock the 

 streams, rivers, and ponds with the best fish that once inhabited 

 them." When fish culture was first attempted in this country, 

 our fisheries of all kinds had deteriorated, till in many places 

 they were on the point of extinction, and in fact, had been 



