86 FISH-CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
confined to New York and New England, and chiefly to the State 
of Massachusetts. Dams hitherto impassible had been opened 
to the passage of anadromous fishes; fish-ways of an improved 
form had been built; a decision of the Supreme Court had given 
to fish the right of way in rivers; acts for the encouragement of 
the cultivation of useful fishes had been passed; the artificial 
hatching of shad and salmon had begun, and an investigation 
ito the exhaustion of sea’ fisheries’ had been set 'on'toot. "All 
these measures were, however, partial and on a small scale. The 
moment had arrived for the interposition of a power stronger 
and more general in its character. 
That democratic and gregarious fish, the scup, was the founder 
of the United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries. It is 
a fish coeval with the first white settlements. In 1621, on the 
shores of Buzzard’s bay, the hungry Englishmen were enter- 
tained by Massasoit with “two fishes like bream, but twice as 
big and better meat,” and Roger Williams says, in 1642, ‘“‘ Mish- 
cup, the bream. Of this fish there is abundance, which the na- 
tives dry in the sun and smoke; and some English begin to 
salt.” With the first warm days of spring, the scup were wont 
to push into the bays and fiords and salt ponds in great multi- 
tudes, standing in from the off shore depths which had sheltered 
them, and furnished them abundant food during the winter. 
Then followed a jubilee for poor and rich. Anybody who had 
a hook and line could catch a ‘‘mess of fish” before breakfast; 
scup, he was sure to get, and he was likely to get a fat tautog or 
a striped bass. But when did a Yankee ever allow any peace 
either to himself or to his neighbor, or when did his mind, sleep- 
ing or waking, ever cease to dwell on the invention of some 
labor-saving machine? Hook and line was too primitive a 
method to be permitted in this age of improvement. About the 
year 1846, one Benjamin Tallman, being doubtless moved and 
abetted by the evil one, conceived the idea of driving posts in a 
straight line running out to sea and stretching thereon netting so 
as to make a fence; and constructing at the end thereof a sort of 
enclosed yard. The schools of scup, as they coasted along the 
shore, ran against the fence, and turning their heads seaward, 
were captured in the said yard. The inventor, in the pride of 
