American Fisheries Society. 129 
First, as a matter of course, has been the pollution of the 
Potomac. ‘Tanneries and pulp mills coolly appropriate the 
water that comes, and foul the water that goes with as little re- 
gard for the rights of others, or the laws of the land, as insur- 
ance Managers or merger promoters. They pour poisons or 
shavings into the water, their neighbors must later drink, in a 
perfectly inhuman way, and with not only a recklessness of con- 
sequences, but with a brazen assurance that grows indignant at 
even mild remonstrance as an impertinence until as an acquaint- 
ance commenting on the forced submission to these corporate 
wrongs, put it: “If nihilism could offer any relief, these fel- 
lows are in a fair way of making converts.” You cannot appre- 
ciate unless you have seen the effect of a couple of pulp mills 
filling up every pool for miles below with rotting shavings, and 
then look at a club record with scores up to three years ago that 
were good enough for anybody, and since then not an entry. 
The Blue Ridge Club below Harper’s Ferry, with some of the 
most enthusiastic and expert anglers of the Capital, have not 
made a catch im three years and pollution would seem to be an- 
swer enough to the question and probably is for that locality. 
A paid guide at Harper’s Ferry will today point you to pools 
and tell you the shavings there are thirty feet deep. But too 
little is known of the effects of pollution even by these scientific 
a few 

sharks whom we are proud to number among our friends 
experiments have been tried of the effect of putting some fish 
into a tank with shavings to see how long they would last, but it 
will require years of investigation and more appropriations than 
the corporations are like to allow, to determine the effect of these 
various contaminations upon fish life. It isn’t alone whether 
a bass may live some weeks over a bed of fresh shavings, if he 
must, but what is the condition of a bed decomposing for ten 
years? Will the smaller fish the bass eats hive? Can he spawn 
in a poplar mattress? Will the vegetable life exist that is nec- 
cessary for the tiny brood? What changes in the Plankton result, 
and what chance has the small fry in a garden of excelsior? By 
the time these questions are all answered they will have used 
paper enough to exhaust the forests on that stream, and the mills 
will have moved. The fact is, Draco’s idea ought to be apphed 
to these fellows. He had but one punishment. The smallest 
2) 
