THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF THE SPORTSMAN 



By iVNDKEw Price, 



' MARLINTON, WEST VIRGINIA. 



I am glad that I have an opportunity of maintaining- l:)efore 

 yon that, in the severely practical, scientific world to which 

 yon belong, the sportsman has the right to exist and that this 

 right does not depend entirely upon the law of fang and claw. 



When I joined this honorable body of scientists some years 

 ago, I did not appreciate the high aims of the Society. I 

 fnlly expected to find here what Isaac Walton calls "brothers 

 of the angle." Bnt I soon found that that arch destroyer of 

 hsh wonld not have been admitted to temples sacred to the 

 life and health of fish and that his writings as to the most 

 deadly lures and methods can only be classed as "murder as 

 a fine art." I ftjund here a society of serious minded men 

 whose whole lives are given to the business of propagating 

 fish and who have little patience with the recreation that poor 

 sufifering humanity gains in the pursuit and death of the 

 inhabitants of the v^aters. 



Levity is not encouraged and I find myself to Ijc the sheep- 

 killing dog in the company of shepherds. Better men than 

 myself, however, have made this mistake. At the meeting of 

 the International Congress of Fisheries at Washin^^ton last 

 }'ear, a caliinet otiicer in giving his address of welcome at- 

 tempted to peqjetrate a pun, which was received with a 

 funereal silence which must lia\e been vi^vy disconcerting to 

 the gentleman. He turned pale and realized tliat lie had 

 committed a solecism that would return to him in the still}- 

 night as he lay upon his restless pillow in after years. He 

 said that one of our great fishes, the cod, was of so much 

 importance that its name had a national significance, n-iean- 

 ing thereby, C. O. D., but the joke was a child of his imagi- 

 nation destined for his express compan}', for the scientists 



