98 Fortieth Annual Meeting 



enemies, the diseases — in short, the hfe history and interrela- 

 tions of all water life from the lowest forms up. Clearly 

 the gigantic task of solving the problems involved in a 

 comprehensive knowledge of water life may be worked out 

 only by the exact and patient and persistent and exhaustive 

 methods of scientific investigation. Every state and 

 nation, all alike vitally interested in the food problem, 

 whether they have direct fishery interests or not, should 

 therefore keep continuously in service a corps of scientists 

 and specialists whose life work is the study and solution of 

 fishery problems. Every lead should be followed out and 

 every clue run down — in short, every minor as well as 

 major problem should be attacked from every possible 

 angle and every point of vantage. 



The necessity as time goes on of drawing more and more 

 on the resources of the sea will be apparent when we reflect 

 that we do not need to look so very far into the future to 

 see practically all of the arable lands of the earth occupied 

 and cultivated. True, irrigation will add considerable areas 

 of highly productive soil, and evaporation and drainage and 

 the building of dykes and levees will continue to expose 

 and reclaim many thousands of acres of the most fertile 

 lands on earth, made so by ages of soil wash from sur- 

 rounding elevations. But, after all, only a small fraction 

 of soil waste in the aggregate may be so recovered. In 

 suspension and solution, the streams and mighty rivers of 

 the earth are annually pouring thousands upon thousands 

 of tons of the most fertile elements of the soil into lakes 

 and seas, where for the most part they are utterly beyond 

 reclamation except indirectly through the fisheries. 



Obviously the more the soil is stirred or cultivated the 

 more rapidly does this process of land exhaustion by soil 

 wash go on. With accelerating speed therefore are the 

 water basins of the earth growing richer and richer and the 

 land areas correspondingly poorer and poorer. But this un- 

 ceasing drainage of elementary food wealth from the soil 

 to the sea does not necessarily mean that it is irretrievably 



