106 Eiest Annual Kepoet of the 



for whatever they will bring in the market. The taking of imma- 

 ture fish will shortly destroy many valuable species, and de- 

 crease, in an increased ratio, the food output, as in two or three 

 years each one of the fish thus caught would have reached a 

 weight of from three to seven or eight pounds. 



The catching of fish otherwise than by hook and line within 

 three miles of low water mark on the Atlantic shores should be 

 prohibited under heavy penalty. 



The mesh of all pounds and cages, nets, seines, fikes and eel- 

 pots should be regulated by law, and all should be operated under 

 a license, the license number to be attached to these various 

 devices in manner prescribed by law. 



All boats have a certain tonnage, whether fishing for pleasure 

 or for the market, should be licensed and required to have plainly 

 marked on the starboard and port bows the license number. The 

 fishermen should be required to make annual statistical returns. 



One of the menaces to our fisheries, both shell and others, and 

 probably the greatest, is that of pollution, and such pollution can 

 best be separated in two classes, the first being that committed 

 by the cities, towns and villages — municipal pollution — the 

 second by the manufacturing plants located adjacent to our public 

 waters. 



The first class of pollution is destructive to our fisheries in two 

 ways. Sewage being composed of large quantities of organic 

 matter, oils and fats, settles upon the lands under water, pro- 

 ducing a deep, slimy mud, while the fats and oils chemically 

 combining with the sodium in the salt form a leathery saponifica- 

 tion which becomes, in time, almost insoluble and forms an im- 

 pervious cover upon the bottom lands which asphyxiates every- 

 thing on them at the time, and ruins the ground for the purposes 

 of spawning of our marine species. It, furthermore, in the nat- 

 ural process of oxidation, absorbs large quantities of oxygen in 

 the water, reducing the oxygen contents to such an extent that 

 even major fish life cannot live in such polluted waters. 



The result of this class of sewage pollution is plainly shown 

 in the destruction of the formerly gr^at oyster beds in the Harlem 

 river, the Hudson river, upper and lower New York bay and the 

 East river, while exhaustive tests of the waters of the East river 

 and the Hudson river have shown that at low tide the absorption 



