FISH CULTURE. 5 



burg in such quantities that the line of their movement 

 shoreward could be seen for some distance out on the 

 lake, and that they were so abundant that the price at 

 the fisheries did not exceed twenty-five cents a bushel 

 basket. We get reliable accounts of the abundance of 

 salmon in the Lamoille and Wjnooski. 



If a man should appear before you to-night — one in 

 whose intelligence and veracity you had unbounded con- 

 fidence — and he should tell you that if you would pro- 

 vide a pathway through the confines of the State — that 

 if you would only bridge over the impassable streams, 

 every calf at weaning time turned loose upon the high- 

 way would go away to the distant pastures of the western 

 wilds, and return, each to his owner's door, a full grown 

 3-year old, fat and ready for the butcher, I take it 

 another spring time would hardly clothe our forests ere 

 every stream would be bridged and every pathway 

 smoothed for this bovine migration. Your Commission- 

 ers tell you to-night that, with a like pathway provided for 

 migratory fishes, each salmon spawn, worth five cents 

 weaned, will come back in two years worth §3, and that 

 each shad hatchling, costing less than a cent, will come 

 back in three years a full grown fish worth twenty-five 

 cents. More, they will tell you that acres upon acres of 

 your barren wastes may be transformed into teeming har- 

 vest fields, yielding an annual income, and that without 

 labor, which exceeds the richest acres of farming -land. 

 More than this, they tell you to-night that this not only 

 can be done, but that it has been done elsewhere, and can 

 be done in Vermont as well. 



Already legislation has so increased the yield of shad in 

 the Connecticut, and some other rivers, that the price has 

 2 



