92 Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting 
had been prosecuted for many years. As I have elsewhere point- 
ed out*, this legislation could have and did have no appreciable 
influence on the supply of mackerel, and it is, of course, well 
known to the members of this Society that the five years of as- 
sumed protection were immediately followed by the most marked 
and long-continued period of scarcity in the history of this fish 
on the American coast. 
I bring up this subject at this time because of the method 
adopted by Congress to attain the ends sought—a method fol- 
lowed by the last Congress in fishery legislation of an entirely 
different nature. It is worthy of remark that Congress did not 
attempt to assume any jurisdiction over the time or manner of 
fishing for mackerel on the high seas, or within the three-mile 
limit, or in state waters, and thus avoided an important consti- 
tutional question, but it accomplished the same thing through 
the customs service—that is, it prohibited the landing on the 
United States coast of mackerel caught during the interdicted 
period. 
Entirely similar legislation was addressed to the sponge 
fishery by the fifty-ninth Congress. The recent advent on the 
Florida coast of more than a thousand Greeks engaged in taking 
sponges by means of diving apparatus—a method prohibited by 
the Florida statutes—aroused the native sponge fishermen to a 
high pitch of excitement, and resulted in bringing the question 
to the attention of Congress, inasmuch as the state found itself 
powerless to cope with the situation, as the Greek divers pled 
their trade in waters beyond control of the state and also beyond 
governmental jurisdiction—that is, beyond a marine league from 
the shore. After a number of hearings, at which the views of 
sponge hookers, the Greek divers, and the Bureau of Fisheries 
were presented, a compromise measure, framed on lines suggested 
by the bureau, was agreed upon and became a law on June 20, 
1906. The principal features of this bill, which goes into effect 
May 1, 1907, are: (1) no sponges taken with diving apparatus 
in the Gulf of Mexico or Straits of Florida shall be landed, de- 
livered, cured, or offered for sale at any port or place in the 
United States, with the exception that sponges so taken in water 
*The Southern Spring Mackerel Fishery of the United States, by 
Hugh M. Smith. Bulletin U. S. Fish Commission, 1898, pp. 193-271. 
aky 

