Proceedings 103 



"I have been much interested in Dr. C. H. Gilbert's 

 work on salmon, for the last two or three years, in find- 

 ing that the age of salmon can be told by the concentric 

 rings of the scales, just as you know the age of a tree 

 by the rings in the wood. There are a good many of 

 these rings in a year, but in the winter, when food is 

 scarce, it appears that the salmon does not grow so 

 rapidly, and the rings are close together ; in the summer, 

 when conditions are favorable for the growth of fish, the 

 rings are farther apart, so that by noticing the number 

 of spaces where the rings are wide apart, it is possible 

 to tell the age of the salmon. 



"The ordinary red salmon of Alaska grows usually to 

 be four years old before it spawns. However, it some- 

 times spawns under age, and sometimes it goes beyond 

 the four years. The king salmon spawns usually when 

 it is four years old, but sometimes it runs on to five or 

 six, and sometimes it spawns as young as one, or pos- 

 sibly two years. All these are reported in the scale, so 

 that if you figure it out, you can find out from the fish 

 all its history. 



"In the habits of the salmon there are many unsettled 

 problems, but one among the most remarkable things of 

 natural history is, that the red or sockeye salmon, which 

 is more abundant than all other salmon in the world put 

 together, never spawn excepting in the water above a 

 lake, and whether the stream running into the sea is a 

 very short one, or whether it is a river like the Yukon, 

 where they must run eighteen hundred miles before they 

 come to a lake, in either case they go up a stream that 

 has a lake, and do not go up a stream that has not. 



"I closed my fisheries career with a very ambitious 

 piece of work — the effort on the part of Canada and the 

 United States to unify their statutes, so that the fisher- 

 ies would be governed by the same laws on the Canadian 

 side of the line in regard to salmon as they were on the 

 United States side. I spent three summers at that work, 

 and went over three times practically the whole length 

 of the international boundary, and with my Canadian 



