104 American Fisheries Society 



colleague and Dr. Evermann, who was with me all the 

 time, and the aid of a number of others, we got out, as 

 I remember, fifty-nine statutes on which we agreed. Most 

 of these were relatively unimportant. Some of them were 

 very important, and those were very difficult. It was 

 almost impossible to frame any kind of statute around 

 Puget Sound that would reduce the number of fishes 

 caught without making it harder for the fishing compa- 

 nies to make the business pay. It is really a difficult 

 problem to prevent people from catching fish. We were 

 more successful around the Great Lakes, but ran against 

 another problem — states' rights. The State of Michigan 

 followed up our work there by passing a state law be- 

 ginning with, "Whereas, all the fishes in the waters sur- 

 rounding the State of Michigan are the property of the 

 State, Resolved, so and so.' The purpose of that was to 

 exclude, as far as they could by statute, all participa- 

 tion of the United States in those problems, making it 

 a state problem, and not a national one. They adopted 

 our recommendations almost without change, so that I 

 think on the whole they were quite an improvement over 

 ours, because they contained some things that we had 

 not put into our regulations. When the regulations were 

 all finished and came before the Government of the 

 United States, all but ten were adopted, and these ten 

 practically covered netting in the Great Lakes and in 

 Puget Sound. Of course these particular ones that were 

 omitted were in some ways least satisfactory, because 

 they dealt with the problem of how to check the killing 

 of fishes without interfering with the fishing industry, 

 and any check is liable to have its injustices and its dif- 

 ficulties. One of the senators from Michigan, aided and 

 abetted by various fishermen, objected to those netting 

 regulations, on the ground of their interference with 

 states' rights, and I understand that the senators from 

 Washington were of the same mind. I understand also 

 that the fisheries of Puget Sound have been showing a 

 very distinct falling off. 



