30 New York State 



Influence of Trade Wastes 



First of all, reference may be made to the reports of State Game 

 Protectors, which are discussed further along in this report. 

 In a questionnaire submitted to them, one inquiry was as 

 follows: In your experience do wastes from industrial plants 

 affect the stream more adversely than the wastes in city sewage? 

 Nearly one-half (49%) of the protectors who replied stated 

 positivel) that they did, another ten per cent thought they did 

 and only five per cent said they did not. About one-third (35#) 

 had no data on which to base an opinion. That such replies were 

 not mere guesses or simple prejudice, but were founded on evidence, 

 is shown by the answers to subsequent queries regarding the par- 

 ticular wastes which in the opinion of the person reporting were 

 most injurious to aquatic life, the places and times in which such 

 damage had been observed, the manner in which the waste in 

 question affected fish life, and the instances in which the treatment 

 of wastes or their removal from the stream had proved beneficial to 

 the fish therein. The answers contained such an amount of definite 

 detail drawn from specific instances that no one could doubt the 

 care with which such cases had been studied, the extended periods 

 of time over which observations had been made, or the effort exerted 

 to eliminate error, snap judgment, and unfair conclusions. Even 

 though one granted that mistakes had been made, yet after all, the 

 evidence was conclusive that such wastes exercised a powerful and 

 baneful influence on the life of the streams. 



In the second place, the industrial wastes very often, if not 

 always, produce such changes in the aspect of the water body that 

 even the casual observer recognizes almost at once the extreme 

 modification of natural conditions and the conspicuous destruction 

 of things which he had been accustomed to see in such places. The 

 change is so radical as to suggest an entirely new condition of 

 affairs, and is as striking as the scar on the landscape produced 

 by a fire in a forested region or by a landslide upon a mountain side. 

 In some cases the bed of the stream appears to be cleaned out, and 

 in others completely covered by a film of waste or by a layer of 

 decaying material or even of some chemical products precipitated 

 from the waste. Even though the observer is not sufficiently 

 informed to determine the precise character of the substances that 

 are spread over the territory, his examination of the water forces 

 him to the conclusion that natural conditions have been eliminated 

 and unnatural ones have taken their place. And he is right in 



