No. 4.] THE HARVEST OF THE SEA. 149 



they know pretty well what they want, and know pretty 

 well about the fisheries of Buzzard's Bay. I am acquainted 

 with scores and perhaps hundreds of men who have spent 

 their lives since childhood fishing, and I say again that I 

 think they know pretty well what they want, and understand 

 pretty well their own interest ; and I tell you, gentlemen, 

 they do not want, and they do not mean to have, foreigners 

 coming and scooping up whole ship-loads of their fish and 

 carrying them away out of their waters. 



]\Ir. Ware. I would like to ask jVIr. Bowker why that 

 record does not go back farther than 1874? 



Mr. Bowker. The only official record that we have of 

 this particular kind of fish goes back only to 1874 ; the 

 record of mackerel goes back farther. 



oNlr. Ware. It is well known that the hereditary instinct 

 of many kinds of fish is very remarkable. It is known that 

 the fry of salmon, ale wives and shad, if put into a river, will 

 go down into the ocean and return to the same places. The 

 habits of fish ])ecome instinctive, and anything that interferes 

 with the natural habits of fish tends to change that instinctive 

 influence, or Avhatever it may be, that makes them return to 

 certain localities. Now, then, I live upon the sea-shore, my 

 farm bounds upon the ocean, and there is a cove right in 

 front of my land. ]Many a time in my younger days I have 

 seen that cove filled with menhaden, and we have put in a 

 seine and hauled them in until we have had hundreds of bar- 

 rels to cart right on the land and apply at once, then and 

 there. Since the fishermen have adopted this wholesale 

 destruction of the menhaden on our shores they do not come 

 there any more. I have not seen my cove filled with men- 

 haden for twenty years, perhaps. We do see them occasion- 

 ally in the bay, but not anything like the amount that there 

 used to be. 



Now, my friend Bowker I think has proved a little too 

 much for his own position. He stated from the highest 

 authority, I will admit, from the Smithsonian Institute, that 

 menhaden live upon the sewage flowing into the sea from the 

 large cities and the vegetable o-rowth alono; the shore, and 

 he calls them " the sea scavengers." Now, any legislation 

 that will protect our shores within the three-mile limit and 



