St 
American Fisheries Society. tee 
tion of a commercial commodity for his sole benefit ; he must be 
educated up to the fact that fish are the sustenance of life as 
well as palatable to the taste; that notwithstanding the artificial 
propagation of fish the state’s propagation cannot keep up with 
his unnatural destruction of them. 
From time immemorial the market fisherman has racked his 
brain to create some device by which he can take the largest 
number of fish with the least trouble, expense and work to him. 
From the primeval means of the Indian who used his spear, we 
have now come to the system of nets, with the use of which, 
in a short time in many of the states, many species of food fish 
will be entirely exterminated. The market demands for fish 
can never at this day be filled with the natural supply, hence I 
take it that this was the reason that the United States govern- 
ment and the state government inaugurated the artificial propa- 
gation of fish and which has resulted in the formation of the 
American Fisheries Society, when at least once a year its 
members may get together to discuss means for the better and 
more effective propagation of fish. 
I must plead ignorance as to any solution of this problem of 
fish protection in any of the states other than my own and the 
states that adjoin it. Beyond any question of contradiction I 
claim that Maryland has in the Chesapeake Bay the richest body 
of water in the world; not only in its finny tribe, but its terrapin, 
its oysters and its crabs, which are world-famed for their value 
as well as their deliciousness. At the same time there is less 
protection in Maryland for these than in any state in the union. 
To particularize ; almost every net that is used for the taking 
of fish in Maryland is prohibited somewhere in the state. One 
county will prohibit the use of a certain net and the adjoining 
county permit it. Purse netting, the greatest known destructor 
of small fish, is prohibited in Maryland, but only above a certain 
line in the Chesapeake Bay. 
In 1g02, after much labor, the Maryland State Game Asso- 
ciation, through its secretary, prepared and passed the bill 
which is known as “The Fresh Water Bill for the Protection of 
Bass, Pickerel, Pike, Perch, also known as wall-eyed Pike, Cali- 
fornia Salmon, Yellow Perch, Rock or Striped Bass, making 
