THIRTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 79 
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give a fair yield in spite of over-fishing, had it not been for the 
erection of impassible dams, which were intended to give water 
power to the manufacturers, or to furnish slack water naviga- 
tion to lumber rafts. As early as 1798, the Connecticut river was 
thus barred at a point just within the northern limit of Massa- 
chusetts, but it was not until 1847 that the Merrimac was in a like 
manner shut off by the great dam at Lawrence. In both cases 
the salmon, stopped on their passage to the spawning grounds, 
became extinct after a few years, while the shad and alewives, 
which could be bred in the lower waters, continued annually to 
revisit these rivers. : 
What happened on the Merrimac and Connecticut happened 
equally on almost every lesser stream in that region. The people 
of New England, lacking advantages for farming, turned all 
their attention to manufacturing. Water power was then much 
cheaper than steam, so that before long there rose a dam_ wher- 
ever there was a fall great enough to turn a millwheel. Except 
some simple trenches for the passage of alewives, no fishways 
were then known. The complete ignorance of this subject may 
be illustrated by the great dam twenty-seven feet high at Law- 
rence. The charter of the company permitted the building of a 
dam, provided a pass were furnished for salmon, which should 
be satisfactory to the County Commissioners. Before the dam 
was finished, a solemn council of the best ichthyological and 
engineering talent was held to determine what kind of a pass 
“would be suitable. The council based its judgment apparently 
on the cheap woodcut in the primary geographies of half a cen- 
tury ago, which represented a salmon briskly leaping over falls 
at least fifty feet high. At any rate, the salmon pass finally ap- 
proved by the learned Commissioners consistedof a simple plank 
trough, sloping from the crest to the foot of the dam, at an angle 
somewhat steeper than forty-five degrees. It is needless to say 
that the salmon declined to exhibit any of the feats of agility por- 
trayed in the wood-cut of the primary geography. 
There soon came to be a general feeling, and one under the cir- 
cumstances quite natural, that manufactures and fish mutually 
excluded each other, and so things were allowed to drift at their 
pleasure. The streams that emptied into salt water no longer 
