130 American Fisheries Society. 



and that it would be very valuable indeed; but at the present there is no 

 way of studying the problem since neither funds nor men are available. 

 And the same is true of many other matters. Take this problem I have 

 laid before you; none of you can say that it is a problem of major prac- 

 tical importance for today or tomorrow; but when you look upon fish 

 culture as going on for a generation, then this sort of knowledge is abso- 

 lutely essential. But here is a problem that only one man in the United 

 States is working at; compare that with the manner in which the work at 

 the agricultural experiment stations is carried on. Wisconsin is putting 

 $5,000 a year into lake work, and that is more than all the other states 

 are putting into this particular job. Money is going into agricultural ex- 

 perimentation and research by millions, whereas in the case of aquiculture 

 it is coming in tens — and that is one reason why nobody can answer these 

 questions that you raise. 



You are bringing up here the question of fry vs. fingerlings. Thirty 

 years ago, when I began coming to this Society, that question was up and 

 it is just as fresh today. Why doesn't somebody get to work on it? Why 

 doesn't somebody stock a stream for a number of years with fry; observe 

 the results carefully ; stock another stream with fingerlings ; then change 

 them about ; find out whether fry or fingerlings are the best to plant and 

 under what conditions? Well, it is because the money is not available to 

 do it. There is not a State P'ish Commission or a National Fish Commis- 

 sion anywhere that I know of that would take up a practical problem like 

 that and work at it for years. Take what was said today of this Lake 

 George report; why do we not know something about the young whitefish — 

 about what it does from the time the egg is laid until the fish is mature; 

 what it feeds on, where it lives, and so on? We are putting millions of 

 dollars into such problems of the land; and we are right in doing so. 

 But we do not study the problems of the water in the same way. When, a 

 few years ago, they wanted a fish pathologist in Washington, Commissioner 

 Smith wrote to me and asked that we help him to get $2,500 or $3,000 from 

 ■Congress for that purpose. That is the way the fisheries business is being 

 run — from hand to mouth. You have to beg for little driblets of money, 

 t You are doing the best you can with the means you have; but through 

 tlie nation and through the states there ought to be money for all sorts of 

 investigations. There should be investigations going on that would con- 

 tinue for ten or fifteen years before final results were reached. Much of 

 the work going on now at our agricultural experiment stations will pro- 

 ceed for years without direct results being noticeable; yet ultimately the 

 results will revolutionize, perhaps, some important branch of agriculture. 

 Certainly aquiculture should be handled in the same way. 



