American Fishertes Society. 38) 
this, that having taken it upon myself to attend the meetings 
of this society, I shall continue to do so as long as I live and 
have my health, and I will meet you all, or as many of you as 
will meet me, every year from this on, not because you have 
seen fit to honor me, but because I think it is a good place to be. 
because there are a lot of good men here and a lot of good fisher- 
men and a lot of men who are engaged, at least as I think, in a 
work higher than perhaps you have all thought, in a work of 
education—and let me say what I mean by that in a word or 
two if I can. A few years ago I was trout fishing on a river 
which is pretty well known in the west and by a great many 
fishermen in the east, the Au Sable River in Michigan. A num- 
ber of men had camped down below where I was encamped, had 
fished there for a week or ten days, and when they started for 
home six or eight men undertook to carry back to their homes 
over 3009 brook trout. Every one of you here knows that such 
a feat as that cannot be accomplished. They lost the most of 
their brook trout, but that was not all; they belonged to the 
genus homo that I have dubbed for the last 25 years as the fish 
hog. At that time we had no restrictive laws with reference to 
taking away from the stream any number of fish, but such inci- 
dents as that have been discussed from time to time, and each 
man would tell his neighbor, until the state of Michigan almost 
voluntarily, without any instruction from its fish commission, 
or even the sportsmen of the state, passed a law limiting the size 
of the trout which could be taken, and the number which could 
be taken away from the stream though you stayed by it all sum- 
mer. 
Now the work of you gentlemen here has been to educate the 
business man so that when he goes out fishing he does not con- 
tinue his business. ‘That is to say, when he is at home in his 
office he is engaged in piling one dollar on top of another; when 
he gets out into the woods he rarely becomes a sportsman at first ; 
he simply changes the things that he is piling top of one another, 
and he piles trout instead of dollars! Well, after a few years of 
association with men like you, he discovers what he goes into 
the woods and along the streams for, viz., to change the current 
of his thoughts and to change the current of his blood, and to 
make a new man out of him, and he finds that if all he wants in 
