130 Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting. 
infraction in the law, he said, deserved it, and the greatest could 
receive no heavier penalty. So of pollution. The limit for any 
infraction, the smallest deserves it as well as the greatest. But 
pollution is not enough to explain the strange recurrence of good 
and bad fishing seasons. It is not seven years of plenty and sey- 
en years of famine, but the alternating periods for the last fif- 
teen or twenty years are about five years each. It is overfishing 
in the good years that exhausts the stock, and must we wait for a 
re-stocking? !s it exhaustion of food supply that leads the bass 
to turn cannibal, which he will do under stress, and is it the real 
race suicide that depletes his ranks till the food supplies again 
come up? None of these are satisfying theories. There is still 
another so remote as to excite derision among two classes: ‘Those 
who know it all, and those who don’t know anything. ‘To plant 
potatoes in the dark of the moon is, with most, a matter of jest, 
yet there is an Angler’s Calendar based on phases of the moon, 
to which some fishermen are as devoted as the sailor to his needle. 
But. this doesn’t help us in the present inquiry, for that calendar 
only points the best time of the month to fish. What is wanted 
now, is an answer to the questions, which are the best years to 
fish, and why? 
The periodic recurrence of sunspots has aroused the attention 
of the scientific world, and a storm of conjecture as to their na- 
ture, origin and effects on earthly phenomena. The sum total to 
date of published information on the subject seems to be as vague 
on these points as to the whence, why and whither of the Aurora 
Borealis. 
But while we are scientifically ignorant of the cause of these 
spots, their purpose and influence, it requires no F. R. 8. to 
follow their periodicity, and to note the coincidence of certain 
phenomena. That the maxima are between ten and eleven years 
may be taken as established. 
The territory of the Central United States along the Great 
Valley of the Mississippi, say in the neighborhood of St. Louis, 
is subject to overflow that threatens for a series of years, but 
culminates one year in ten, for instance, in 1893 and 1993, in 
destructive floods. These are the years of the greatest number of 
sunspots and with these immediately succeeding are marked by 
severe winters, and wet cool summers for that parallel, and these 
