THE ULTIZATION AND PRESERVATION 

 OF FRESH- WATER MUSSELS 



By Robert E. Coker, Washington, D. C. 



The fresh-water mussels, or, in the language of the 

 river banks, the "clams" that grow half -buried in the bot- 

 toms of our streams, form a state and national resource 

 that is too little appreciated. Their importance is based 

 only in part upon the facts that they are a basis of fishery 

 for shells amounting to some eight hundred thousand 

 dollars a year and of pearls amounting to about four hun- 

 dred thousand dollars more, and that they furnish a live- 

 lihood to ten thousand fishermen and their families, while 

 they support an industry yielding an annual product, 

 principally of buttons, valued at from five to nine million 

 dollars, according to the state of the trade, and employing 

 several thousand wage earners. The real value of the mus- 

 sels is intensified by the fact that they are the principal 

 source of material for the manufacture of a universal 

 necessity, as well as the best abundant material for this 

 purpose. We can enumerate statistically, as we have 

 in part, some of the concrete benefits derived from the 

 capture and utilization of mussels, but if your memory 

 can return over a period of 25 years past, you will under- 

 stand that we can go further and say that without the 

 fresh-water mussels, each and every person in this coun- 

 try, practically speaking, would be deprived of the op- 

 portunity to obtain a most ordinary, commonplace neces- 

 sity at anything like the present modest prices for an 

 article of good quality. Leaving out of account then, the 

 producer, the manufacturer, and the unhappy middle- 

 man, let us consider the interest of the consumer as para- 

 mount. Now in the case of the fresh-water mussel and 

 its trade product, the fresh-water pearl-button, the con- 

 sumer is almost every human being within the confines 

 of the United States and many without. It is easy, there- 

 fore, to apply the argumentum ad hominem. Exclude 



