TENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 61 
GENERAL STATISTICS. 
BY BARNET PHILLIPS. 
Last year one of our most useful and practical members, Mr. 
G. S. Lamphear, presented to the notice of this meeting care- 
fully prepared statistics, relating to the total pounds of each 
kind of fish received in the wholesale markets of this city. 
These tables, the result of a great deal of careful investigation, 
were perhaps the first of the kind ever brought to your notice. 
I need not suggest to you all the deductions which arose from 
these figures. I may cite, however, the following. It is only by 
such exact figures that we can arrive at positive determinations 
in regard to the abundance or a scarcity of any particular fish. 
Now, this abundance or scarcity may be general or local. New 
York city, with capacious maw, devours an incalculable quan- 
tity. I use the word incalculable perhaps in a poetic sense, for 
it is more or less impossible to count the fish. To be less vague, 
let us say that our markets draw to themselves an enormous 
quantity of fish. If fish, then, be scarce in one locality, this 
want of fish is supplied necessarily from another quarter. This 
area of productive water is then, by means of easy transporta- 
tion, always yielding a certain quantity of fish. Say that cod are 
scarce off Sandy Hook—the demand for cod brings in fish from 
Gloucester, from Maine. Take striped bass. It may not be 
found at one season in the North River, but the supply may 
come from the Delaware or from the Chesapeake. | It is, then, 
the gross quantity of fish received in New York which tells us 
absolutely whether a fish is generally scarce or plenty. Now, 
with such tables as have been made by Mr. Lamphear, to be sup- 
plemented later by other compilations which the United States 
Fish Census will shortly have ready, I believe we will get to the 
great bottom facts in regard to fish, whether caught on our coast 
or in our inland waters or lakes. If we do get these figures as 
accurately as human investigations can make them, we shall 
then better determine what kind of fish, being scarcer, may pre- 
_ sent themselves to our special care as worthy of culture. 
It would be very presumptuous on my part, not having the 
