TENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 63 
7 
are then some of the great problems which the Fish Ceusus will 
solve ; it will give us exact determinations, and, having some 
fixed sabes to work upon, we will no longer be in the dark. 
Might I be allowed to state that public opinion, even special 
opinion in regard to such matters, is worth very little? We are 
all inclined to take too narrow views of such objects as surronud 
us. Our own horizon is necessarily limited. A fisherman, a sin- 
gle dealer, may form his own personal experience declare that 
fish are scarce, and so they may be. The fisheaman may have 
had bad luck or the dealer fewconsignments. These individual 
experidnces are perfectly correct, but their general deductions 
may be absolutely incorrect. Then again, popular opinion in 
regard to fishis prone to error. Providing fish remain in the 
same quantity, are there not incalcalably more mouths to eat 
them? It is not possible to imagine that while fifty years ago 
there was one fish and more for every New Yorker (say in 1831), 
in 1881 there is not one-half of a fish for each person, and that 
the extra person must be satisfied with the bones? All this 
means that the fish being the same in the sea, even with increased 
fishing, there are more fish wanted. The fish is then a fixed 
quantity, the methods and men necessary to get more fish aug- 
ment, but the number of people who want to eat fish, must eat 
fish, increases faster than the other two. There might be then 
a timearrived at—we do not pretend to fix the date—when the one 
fish would have to go round among three, five, ten people. If 
the example of the wants of a single large centre of population 
may be precised, does not the same rule of supply and demand 
hold good for the whole country ? 
Now comes in that which this Association are doing their 
utmost to advance, and that is fish culture. We have then, say, 
that fixed quantity, the normal number of fish, and that con- 
stantly increasing hunger of many more mouths to eat this 
normal number. Is the first to remain a rigid quantity? The 
American Fish Cultural-Association believe that this need not be 
fixed, but that there are possibilities of increasing the number 
of fish. Now, not so many years ago, all the ends of this asso- 
ciation were limited to trout culture. We have expanded some- 
what since then, and with us the science and detail of fish culture 
