Taylor and Wells. — Preservation of Nets and Lines. 71 



lines, traps, etc., made of twine. If we could double the life of that ma- 

 terial we would save something like ten or fifteen million dollars a year. 

 The work we have done indicates that we can go a long way toward at 

 least increasing the life of these lines, if not actually doubling it. In some 

 cases we have very much more than doubled the life of the lines as com- 

 pared with untreated white lines remaining permanently in ocean waters 

 until they were completely rotten. 



Mr. J. N. Cobb, Seatle, Wash. : Have the preparations you tested been 

 used before? 



Mr. Taylor : All but copper oleate, which we made. 



Mr. J. N. Cobb; Is it the one that proved best? 



Mr. Taylor: Yes. The idea occurred from the use of bluestone and 

 soap dissolved in water. Of course, copper oleate is one of the things sup- 

 plied by that reaction. We found that copper oleate was the only one soluble, 

 so we ignored everything else and took the copper oleate dissolved in gasoline. 



Mr. J. N. CoBB: You stated that a gill net could be used practically 

 one year in the salmon industry. My experience in Alaska gill netting for 

 salmon is that we would start with an old net and use it about two weeks ; 

 then we would bring it in and dry it, putting out a new one. That new 

 net finished the season, then we would use it again for the first few weeks 

 of the next season. That would mean that we used a gill net three months 

 or less, and that was the life of it. 



Mr. Taylor : I will have to add here, Professor Cobb — for the sake 

 of brevity I had to leave out a good many things — that we have been carry- 

 ing on two more series of experiments in addition to the ones mentioned 

 in the paper : one at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the other at Put-in 

 Bay, on Lake Erie. We found that fresh water is very much harder on the 

 lines than salt water. Our copper oleates are not showing up nearly as 

 well in Lake E'rie as they have been at Beaufort and Key West. Copper 

 oleate appears to be more soluble in fresh water than in salt water. 



Mr. J. W. TiTcoMB, Hartford, Conn.: Can a commercial fisherman who 

 wants to buy a net or treat a net tell from your paper what these different 

 preparations are which you compare? 



Mr. Taylor: In most of them there would not be any difficulty. One 

 or two have been withdrawn from the market ; in the other cases the adver- 

 tising matter makes known what is in it. If a fisherman reads between 

 the lines and reads the circulars, he can very easily tell. 



Mr. Titcomb: This copper oleate is a preparation which you have 

 yourself devised? 



Mr. Taylor: Yes. We are now making it up and beginning to treat 

 lines for people experimentally. We are sending to the laboratory at Beau- 

 fort a case of this stuff put up in tin cans, with instructions to give it free 

 of charge to any of the fishermen who want to try it. We furnish it for 

 a limited time. 



Mr. Titcomb: After you have furnished it free for a time, what do 

 you propose to do? Are you going to commercialize it, or is it going to be 

 given out so that anybody can make it? 



