88 FISH-CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
assisted by that of the general Government. Its rapidly in 
creasing value and power culminated in the great fishery exhib- 
itions of Berlin and London, where the United States exhibits 
gained the chief prizes. 
The history of the movement for the restoration of our fishes 
may seem like a triumphal march; but in summing up its results 
we cannot in honesty avoid the cold question cuz dono? of what 
good is all this? 
Up to the year 1880, the fishery commissions of the States and 
of the general Government had had appropriated $1,306,378. 
Has the country got a return of a million dollars’ worth of ad- 
ditional fish? 
In 1880, the total value of the fishery products of the United 
States was $43,000,000, a less sum than that of the manufactures 
in a single Congressional district in the little State of Massa- 
chusetts. The two products show that real value is not always 
to be measured by money. The people of this country could 
have been deprived of the manufactures of that district, without 
recognizing their loss, but what an outcry would arise were they 
cut off, even for a month, from cod and white-fish, lobsters and 
oysters! 
Did the expenditure of $1,300,000, since 1866, add anything to 
the $43,000,000 which our fisheries produced in 1880, or did it 
pave the way for an increase? 
To answer these questions we must define what we mean by 
a decrease in fisheries. 
When so many fish are annually taken from the waters, that 
the remainder are not numerous enough to produce a new crop 
equal in numbers to the old one, there must be a progressive de- 
crease in the yield. It is a very simple matter to demonstrate 
such a decrease in ordinary rivers or in lakes of moderate size, 
where it is easy that spearing and netting of the trout on their 
spawning beds has diminished their numbers, or that the estab- 
lishment of weirs has made white-fish scarce. In the bays and 
coves of the sea, also, where the waters are shallow, it is not 
dificult to show that the use of numerous fykes and trawl-lines 
destroy the local fish, like tautog, rock-bass and flounders. But, 
when we come to the schooling fishes of the open sea, it’ is very 
