156 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



citizen of our own State. The law should be such, in my 

 judgment, that any citizen of the United States shall have 

 the rio;ht, under certain restrictions, to £i:o into the waters of 

 any State in the Union and take these fish when they appear, 

 for they are a crop to be harvested like a crop of hay, and I 

 lielieve no one will be injured, but the world enriched. You 

 cut your hay to-day, and if the weather is good you house 

 it to-morrow. If you do not, it is lost forever. These fish 

 come to our shores yearly ; they are one of our annual crops ; 

 we take it to-day, and it is secured for the l)enefit of man- 

 kind. To-morrow it is gone, and that particular crop will 

 never appear here again. 



Now, I want to answer a remark made l)y Mr. AVare. I 

 am surprised that any man should get up here and say that 

 we want these fish preserved for sanitary reasons. 



Mr. Ware. That is your own argument. 



Mr. Bow^KER. I referred to the fact that they consumed 

 the sewage of our cities, or rather the lower orders of plant 

 life produced by sewage, not with reference to purifying the 

 sea, but with reference to returning to the land the plant 

 food which had been poured into the sea. Do you realize 

 that three-quarters of the globe is covered with water? 

 Those of you who have undertaken a trip even across the 

 Atlantic know wiiat a great waste of water there is, and that 

 is but a bagatelle. If you have travelled across this country, 

 you realize something the extent of it ; and yet all the land 

 of the globe is only one-fourth of the w^ater. Talk about our 

 preserving the fish along our shores for sanitary reasons ! 

 It's absurd. The sea-weed which is sometimes collected and 

 used as a fertilizer is the food of all kinds of fish ; they are 

 supposed to eat more or less of it ; but as to the fish purify- 

 ing the })eautiful sea in front of Mr. Ware's hotel, why, he 

 might just as well attempt to purify it with germicides and 

 a hand pump. It purifies itself through the action of the air 

 and the sunlight. 



I do not want, however, to narrow this discussion down 

 to the simple question of plant food, l)ut rather it is a ques- 

 tion of food, either directly or indirectly, for man as well as 

 for plants. Now, Huxley, the best authority on the sub- 

 ject, has stated, as I said in my paper, that, if it were not 



