426 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 
but that it should furnish material and facilitate research 
on the part of others who would join together to establish 
such a laboratory at private expense was not only proper 
but laudable. The foundations for the present important 
and flourishing laboratory at Wood’s Hole were thus 
laid. But the necessity of caution was made all the more 
evident by the unfriendly attacks of some members of 
Congress as the laboratory grew more important and 
more widely known. 
That the growth of the establishment should not be 
hampered by land speculators, a friend of Baird’s, a 
co-worker at the Smithsonian, Dr. J. H. Kidder, pur- 
chased at prevailing values a sufficient amount of adjacent 
land which he held for the laboratory’s future use. 
It soon became evident to Professor Baird that the 
multitudinous traps, pounds and other appliances, which 
lined the fishing shores, and in Chesapeake Bay made it all 
but impossible for anadromous fishes, like the shad and 
herring, to reach their spawning grounds in fresh water, 
were the real causes of the diminution of the supply of 
food fishes. No animal of a size large enough to have an 
economic value can long escape destruction by the myriad 
devices invented for its capture by man. On the other 
hand, the attempt to check entirely the more destructive 
modes of capture would raise against the Commission the 
united forces of pecuniary interest and its corollary, Con- 
gressional influence. A limited amount of restriction 
might be borne by the fisherman, but any attempt to root 
out the real evil was obviously, at that period, impracti- 
cable. The only solution of the difficulty lay in increasing 
the stock of fishes so that it would survive the danger of 
extermination. 
The American Fish Culture Association was alive to 
