Sixth Annual Meeting. 97 



to learn to eat fish as they do other things. They, for instance, 

 in some parts of Norway do not know to eat mackerel. They 

 are afraid of mackerel, because they say the black stripe along- 

 side of the back is meat of the young creature, and they are 

 afraid of that. Others do not eat eels because they are a kind 

 of snake. But in the last year there has been a large alteration 

 in that, and people all over Norway eat mackerel ; they have 

 learned to do it. I think if the American people would learn to 

 eat all kinds of fish that are here in America, the fish trade would 

 be larger, and the benefit very large also, because, as the 

 Americans say, fish makes brains. We Norwegians say brains 

 make fish, because to get these fish we have to use brains. But I 

 think the question about that is a real business question, and the 

 first one is to teach the people how to eat fish ; and if any business 

 man has customers that know how to eat the several kinds of 

 fish, he also will know how to get the fish from the fishermen. 

 In short, my opinion about the question is this, that we in 

 Norway have learned that the best way to get customers for fish 

 is to deliver the fish as plain as possible, without any preparation; 

 and if you could send it fresh in ice I think we would prefer 

 that to any other way, leaving to the customers and the eaters 

 how to pickle them or how to cook them. 



The President : Before you sit down, will you be kind 

 enough to tell us the condition of the fisheries in your streams 

 now, and whether anything has been done to keep them up ? 



Mr. Walheim : In Norway they have been very anxious to 

 know the reason why the herring-fisheries are lost now, after 

 having been going I do not know how many hundred years. 

 The cod-fisheries, so far as our history goes, have been kept on 

 in the northern part more than a thousand years, and there is 

 no decrease or increase in it to be mentioned. Some years we 

 catch 20,000,000, in other vears we catch 30,000,000, and, I 



