44 TWENTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL MEETING 



by any sort of law, by cutting the appropriation, and they 

 did it. It was not because we did not have the law by which 

 we could act; it was because these men sought to hamper us 

 in this way, as a rebuke to Commissioners who draw no money 

 for work, who want none, and who have worked faithfully in 

 the interests of the State. Yet they characterize us as iaien 

 who have a selfish interest. We have nothing but the inter- 

 ests of the public at heart. This thing that you speak of can 

 be taken care of. You can get your eggs as can every other 

 Commission, by a law passed permitting you to get them dur- 

 ing the closed season; of course, with proper restrictions. I 

 would go a step further than has been done in Michigan. The 

 law ought to be, and the United States Commission can do 

 now, what we have never been able to do, return every stripped 

 fish that was in good condition and likely to live to the waters, 

 and not market it. We have been forced to market fish be- 

 cause of the small appropriations we got from time to time. 



Mr. Clark: Mr. Chairman, there is one point there it does 

 not seem to me the peo])le grasp. It is not the idea of how 

 to run our hatcheries. If the closed season is the right thing, 

 if natural spawning is the right thing, the artificial or protec- 

 tive propag'ation is wrong. They cannot both be right. If 

 the process of a closed season, allowing the fish to spawn 

 themselves, is the right method, then the other is wrong, and 

 I do not think the point is Avell taken as to how we are going 

 to run the hatcheries; that is not the question at all. The 

 question is how you can save and return the most fish to the 

 waters. That is the question. It is not by their spawning 

 naturally, for nobody for a moment would think that you 

 could put in as many as you could if they were protected. You 

 simply get the eggs and protect them until they come to a 

 certain stage. It looks to me like saving those eggs. They 

 are w^asted, all but a fractional percentage of the whitefish, 

 if they spawn naturally, but if you have those eggs and protect 

 them and take care of them and plant them in the water you 

 plant a moving, living thing, but if they spawn in masses as 

 they do sometimes, it is simply a wholesale waste. The time 

 to protect your adult fish, the time to make your closed season, 

 is when the most unripe fish are caught, because every unripe 

 whitefish that is caught means thirty to seventj^-five thousand 

 germs wasted. 



Mr. Whitaker: May I just say a word further? The point 

 of it is this, you can fill this country with Fish Commissions, 

 put them on every square mile of land, and it is not possible for 

 you to spawn all whitefish that are taken in the month of 

 November. The point is take all you can, but do not let the 

 fishermen kill the ova in the rest. This small precentage under 



