84 Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting 
Mr. Clark: ‘The increase to a certain extent has been by pro- 
tection and propagation, and we want to continue it still more 
thoroughly. 
Mr. Brown: Right in this line I want to say that during the 
last session of the legislature of Michigan we read some of these 
figures to show the members the importance of the work, the 
number of people that were employed in the business and the 
amount of capital invested, and some of the members asked us 
about the statistics of other states, and we had none. The United 
States takes them only once in five years and we were criticised 
for making our own statistics. Now I want to ask if the mem- 
bers do not think that the same sort of statistics and the same 
methods from all other states would be valuable and help the 
fishing interests generally. Mr. Fullerton I think, overlooked in 
his remarks the large increase in the amount of nets and seines 
that are in use now as compared with a few years since. 
Mr. Fullerton: J took that into consideration. 
Mr. Brown: And the large increase in the price. I want to 
speak also about sewage and its relation to pollution of waters. 
Take the Saginaw river between Bay City and Saginaw where all 
the ordinary sewage of the city runs into the river, there was 
never any notice of the stream being depleted until they begun 
to turn the beet sugar factory waste in, which contains sulphuric 
acid, lime, etc., and that surely killed the fish. But between 
November and Mar ch of every winter they fish with nets; and 
in that thirteen miles of river in 1904 the catch was 1,600,000 
pounds, of which 535,000 pounds was perch, 777,000 suckers, and 
then some bass and sunfish, 122,000 pounds, and of course this 
shows that it is not all pollution that makes a very marked differ- 
ence in the catch, particularly in the case of rough fish. 
Dr. Birge: I should like to call attention to the point that 
Mr. Brown mentioned, that of the increase in the nets. I wish 
that Mr. Bower, if he could find time to do so, would prepare a 
correlation table showing the ratio between some unit of net 
pounds or whatever he may select, to the amount of fish caught 
in that year. It seems to me that the showing would be more 
favorable for the fish than I had anticipated. The pound nets 
