Ward. — Preservation of Fish Fauna 167 



Mr. Cranston : I am advised by one of the members of the State 

 Board of Health in Oregon that it is not the lack of law; the diffi- 

 culty is that in order to bring action to enforce these regulations you 

 have got to bring action against the people themselves. You know 

 what that means. 



Mr. Nathan R. Buller, Pennsylvania : I represent a state that 

 has more pollution to the square inch of water than any state in the 

 Union ; and our laws covering that question are very good. We have a 

 Department of Health, and not a Board of Health, but the Department 

 of Health is ruled over by a Commissioner ; his title is Health Com- 

 missioner of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He has jurisdiction 

 over all sewage from towns and cities in the Commonwealth ; and 

 while the question is one of great magnitude, he is working along 

 these lines, that each town and each city will be compelled to put in 

 plants to take care of their sewage, instead of running it in the public 

 streets, as is done in a great measure at the present time. 



I consult with him very frequently. It is not a problem that can 

 be solved in a few weeks or a few months ; it is a long-drawn-out 

 question, and in these few years his department has been created he 

 has done great work. 



Now, a great many of these towns and cities at the present time 

 are burdened with heavy debts, and it is a very hard matter to get 

 them to issue bonds to build these plants ; but it will all come ; each 

 town will be compelled to do it. This Health Commissioner, I might 

 say, has unlimited means at his command to bring these matters about. 



The Department of Fisheries has jurisdiction over the pollution 

 of streams from manufactories, of which we have about 47,000 in the 

 State of Pennsylvania that are running refuse into our streams at the 

 present time. Such small problems as arise from the pollution of 

 streams from sawmill refuse and wood alcohol and acid mills, are very 

 easily solved ; a great many of the acid plants today that are located on 

 our streams are putting in plants that take absolute care of their pollu- 

 tion, so that in a very short time there will be no pollution in our 

 streams from that source. 



With the tanneries, of which there are quite a number, I have taken 

 this course. I find, on investigation, that there is not much to be 

 gained by sporadic attempts upon them. If you take a case here and 

 there, there is not much accomplished. But in order to accomplish 

 some results and eliminate this pollution, united action is necessary. 

 I am shortly to have a conference with the representatives from 

 every tannery in the State of Pennsylvania, and they as a body will 

 work out some definite plan that each one is to pursue. With our 

 paper mills we have the hardest proposition that presents itself, on 

 account of the great amount of water that they use in the manufacture 

 of paper ; but it is a fact that I have visited paper mills on the Clarion 

 River, which is a river so polluted that even a typhoid germ will refuse 

 to live in it ; and these paper mills are spending thousands of dollars 



