96 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



In both Massachusetts aud Rhode Island the attempt to prove that 

 the food of these fishes had become scarce, was a complete failure. 



The fifty-seventh interrogatory of the joint special committee of 

 Rhode Island had special reference to this point. 



Twenty-two of the witnesses answered directly that there was no 

 scarcity of food, and of the rest, I think there was not one, not even 

 Mr. Tallman, who testified that it was not as abundant as it had been 

 years before. Mr. Johnson goes so far as to say, " I never knew as 

 much food for fish as at present." Mr. Matthewson says, " Mussels are 

 fully as abundant now as I ever knew them to be ; new beds have 

 formed right in front of my place." Mr. Place says, " No scarcity of 

 food ; pleutier now than ever." Mr. Rice says, " For mussels, &c.', are 

 plentier than ever." So the committee in Rhode Island, in their re- 

 port, well say that, " in the opinion of your committee, the preponder- 

 ance of evidence is that there is an abundant supply." 



In Massachusetts there was less testimony on this point, and what 

 there was went only far enough to show that the food may have changed 

 ground, and that if there was scarcity of one kind, there was plenty 

 of another. 



It was from the very slightest testimony, therefore, that the Massachu- 

 setts committee concluded that the cause of the diminution of fish in Buz- 

 zard's Bay " maybe a scarcity of the bait on which they are accustomed to 

 feed, as hirge beds of mussels on which some of these species feed have 

 been killed by star-fishes, (five-finger, so called by the fishermen.)" Mr. 

 Atwood does not assign this as a cause, except that the blue-fish de- 

 vours the food of other fishes; he does not anywhere say, nor commit 

 himself to the opinion, that the food of these fishes has become scarce. 



During .the past year new beds of mussels are being formed, as we 

 should infer would be the case, from the growing scarcity of the fish 

 which consume it. 



It will be observed, too, that the traps catch large quantities of the 

 food of these fishes, so that if it has become scarce, they are one of the 

 causes of it. 



We are forced to the conclusion, from all the testimony concerning 

 the food for these fishes, except of those kinds taken by the traps them- 

 selves, that it never was so abundant, while the fishes were never so few 

 to consume it. 



3. Impurities in the water. 



If the testimony to sustain the scarcity of food, as a cause of the scar- 

 city of the fish, established the fact that there was no scarcity, but 

 abundance, so the testimony upon this point showed nothing so much 

 as the weakness of the cause of the trappers, and the shifts they were 

 put to to defend their wretched work. 



The destructive effects of deleterious substances thrown . into the 

 water was attempted to be* proved in Rhode Island and in Massachu- 

 setts, and in both cases without success. 



One trapper in Rhode Island resorted to the novel and ingenious theory 

 that scup were more sensitive to such influences than any other fish, 

 and one witness in Massachusetts had known a small bed of clams near 

 New Bedford to be tainted, and this, from one petroleum factory, was 

 the cause of the scarcity of fish in the tide-waters from Palmer's Island 

 to Noman's Land, a distance of more than thirty miles. 



The same interrogatory (57th) and the 78th to 81st, put by the Rhode 

 Island committee, covered this point. Nineteen witnesses testified that 

 of their own knowledge no impurities existed in the waters with which 

 they were acquainted, or that if there were any, they had failed to ob- 



