96 Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting. 
as fast as a person can cast his hook, and that pond has been 
fished in for a number of years, and any one that goes there can 
easily get a handsome basket filled with trout; and yet those 
suckers have probably lived there for centuries, and the trout are 
there too; and it does not seem to have any influence in the 
supply of trout. 
Mr. Meehan: The department of Fisheries of Pennsylvania, 
in this matter, is between the Devil and the deep sea. The 
people who own trout streams are constantly writing to the 
department, asking for permission to catch suckers from their 
streams, on the ground that they are destroying the spawn of the 
trout. Within two weeks | have had letters from two prominent 
associations owning trout streams, making this demand, and in 
both cases they stated that they had positive evidence that the 
suckers were spawn eaters to a very great extent; that they had 
actually seen them at work on the spawning beds. Personally 
[ have not seen them devouring the spawn, but we get this 
testimony from all parts of the state, where the trout thrive. 
On the other hand we have a very worthy class of people in 
Pennsylvama who are generally and commonly known as Penn- 
sylvania Dutch. They live in a section generally where there 
are to-day no trout, though there were plenty of trout years ago. 
These men want the suckers carefully protected, and will resist 
any effort to destroy them. In the low lands of Pennsylvania, 
in counties like Chester and Lancaster, where we have open 
meadows and farm lands, the trout are undoubtedly decreasing 
in numbers; but in the mountain streams, in counties like Wayne 
and Pike they are decidedly on the increase. The old fisher- 
men who have fished for 50 or 609 years living in Wayne 
county, report that the fishing is better there this year than it 
was 30 years ago. In Center county, in the mountains, famous 
for its trout, they say that trout fishing is better than it was 
15 or 20 years ago. But in Clinton, Forest and several other 
counties in that section, where the lumbermen haye simply 
destroyed the forests, the trout had practically disappeared, but 
with the passing of the lumberman and heavy restocking from 
the hatcheries, trout are decidedly on the increase in this section. 
Mr. Whish mentions Pennsylvania as one of the states in 
which the parasite is found. Now I cannot say that that has 
