186 THE SHAD STERAMS OF PENNSYLVANIA. 

couraged the farmers to club together to buy nets and engage actively 
in fishing. 
The statements made in some newspapers during the fishing season 
of 1891 that the fishermei were greatly alarmed by the alleged tre- 
mendous decrease in the take of shad, were not correct. It is true that 
the waters of the Delaware the year previous were filled with this 
species, and at the height of the season as many as 100,000 were caught 
and brought to the Philadelphia market in one day. 
The largest haul made on any one day in the season of 1891 netted 
about 75,000 shad. Notwithstanding the yield for 1891 was about 
twenty-five per cent. less than that of 1890, prices were much better, 
“roes” selling as high as thirty dollars per hundred, and as a rule the 
fishermen found the harvest had yielded greater profits than did that of 
the previous year. This was brought about chiefly by the phenomenal 
number of “counts” or large roe shad. 
Impurities in the waters of the river furnished satisfactory reason 
for the decreased number of shad so far as a few of the fishermen were 
concerned. They believed the sewage from the great city of Philadel- 
phia, and the refuse from the gas works and the oil refineries, had driven 
away or killed off the numerous schools of fish; but such does not 
seem to be the case, for authentic information received from persons 
living on the upper reaches of the river show that the waters were alive 
with shad, and they were seen disporting by hundreds for many miles 
above Egypt Mills, in Pike county, and well up in New York State, fully 
three hundred miles from the ocean, a point higher than they have been 
known to reach since 1823, when the canal company erected the dam 
across the river at Lackawaxen. 
In 1890 a fishway was placed in this dam jointly by Pennsylvania and 
New York, and for the first time in nearly seventy years the people of ~ 
that region had this luxury brought to their very doors. 
In all probability many thousands of shad were successful in ascenc- 
ing the river to their natural spawning grounds in its upper waters, and 
more eggs were thus deposited naturally there in 1891 than for many 
years previously. 
Artificial propagation must be largely depended upon for profitable 
results in the restoration of the fisheries, whether of our rivers or lakes. 
It is true that many disappointments have been experienced in the 
work begun in this direction, and the hopes of a recovery from depletion 
and an increase in the supply have in many cases been blasted. Fail- 
ures no donbt have resulted in a large degree from the limited scale on 
which the work was formerly conducted—where a hundred thousand 
young fish were introduced a million should have been liberated—but 
the United States Fish Commission and the State Commissions in their 
earlier days were unable to procure large quantities of eggs, and it was 
only by gradual processes that the spawning fish were multiplied suf- 
ficiently to answer the purpose. 
