Fish^ Fishing and Fisheries of Pennsylvania. 37 



substances also. la the natural ponds or lakes, besides all these 

 things, pike nets, dynamite, and other explosives were used, and exces- 

 sive ice fishing was indulged in. In this last particular the writer saw 

 recorded, as a matter to take pride in, in a registry book of a backwoods 

 hotel in Pike county, that a party of five, whose names were given, had 

 in one winter's work in the early "seventies," caught from one pond 

 more than seven hundred pickerel; and the same book showed that dur- 

 ing the same winter more than three thousand pickerel had been taken 

 from that body of water. It was no wonder that in the season of 1891j 

 less than one hundred of that species of fish were caught in those waters. 

 But worse even than fish baskets, dynamite, deleterious substances 

 and unfair fishing, because farther reaching, was another element — 

 stream pollution. Saw mills were erected in the backwoods on the 

 banks of trout streams and the sawdust dumped into the water. By this 

 means millions of fish were killed. Within the coal bearing area mines 

 were opened and the filthy culm, composed of carbon and clay, emptied 

 into the water ; and thereafter pure sparkling streams, richly populated 

 by mountain trout, were emptied of their fish, and ran, black, filthy and 

 malodorous, to the rivers, which thereby became befouled, and, in many 

 cases, almost absolutely fishless. Two notable examples of this lament- 

 able result may be named — the Lehigh river and the upper waters of 

 the Schuylkill. 



