Unutilized Fisheries Resources of Canada 



BY 



Prof. E. E. Prince, hh.D., D.Sc, F.R.S.C. 

 Dominion Commissioner of Fisheries, Ottawa 



MR. CHAIRMAN and Gentlemen : I may claim for the subject 

 upon which I am to speak that it is a very large one althon.gh 

 I shall have to treat it in a somewhat sketchy and fragmentary way. 

 Many of the readers of papers before this Commission have also 

 explained that their subject was a large one and I fear that it is a 

 disability that attaches to most fishery questions. They all seem to 

 expand and become large questions. But this matter of the unutilized 

 fishery resources of Canada is one which seems to grow the more you 

 look into it. I promise you this morning that I shall be very condensed 

 and brief in my remarks. 



It is not necessary to point out to the members of the 



High Value Commission of Conservation that the utilizing of 



of By-products ^ , , , , j • 



waste products as a source of wealth has expanded m 



many industries to such an extent that in some cases the by-products 

 or waste materials have proved more profitable and important than the 

 original product of the industry. In a paper before the Commission 

 in January, Dr. Haanel made reference to coal tar which, he said, had 

 for many years been regarded as a waste product, but on which has 

 been founded one of the largest and most profitable industries in 

 Germany, the manufacture of aniline dyes. Germany, as in so many 

 cases, utilized the discovery of a Lancashire man, Dr. Crace Calvert, 

 who was the first to find these wonderful dye products in coal tar, and 

 I have an interesting little pamphlet published by him in Manchester, 

 I think, in 1845, upon this subject. That discovery has led, as you all 

 know, not only to one industry but to a series of valuable industries, 

 the production not only of colours but scents and flavours used in 

 the manufacture of candies and confections, glycerine and creo- 

 sote, as well as a variety of other products. These have been the 

 result of Dr. Calvert's discovery in regard to that waste product, coal 

 tar, which was used for forty or fifty years simply as a hot cement for 

 holding together paving stones in the street. Our sawdust waste has 



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