410 
'FOREST AND STREAM. 
Nov. 23, 1901. 
in one day by Henry H. Chase, and the same number of 
raccoons -(vere brought down from one tree. 
Duck shooting in the vicinity of North Pappoosesquaw 
Point, Narragansett Bay, is followed now a great deal. 
The ducks are beginnmg to come inshore from the bay, 
but not many of them have been shot so far. 
A prouder and merrier party of deer hunters never 
returned from the deer country than Elisha Buffington, 
his brothers, Ray and Paul, and George Young, of Swan- 
sea, who have been gunning in Flagstaff, Somerset coun- 
ty, Me., for a couple of weeks. Their headquarters were 
at the Ray Hill camp. Cliflf Wing, a trusty guide, was 
the sportsmen's companion, as in previous years. Seven 
deer were shot by them, as follows: Elisha Buffington, 
an eight-pointed buck, weighing 162 pounds ; Roy Buffing- 
ton. an eight-pointed buck and a doe, weighing 174 and 
too pounds, respectively, also a small buclc; George 
Young, a six-pointed buck weighing 116 pounds. Four 
deer were brought home by the party. A dozen or more 
partridges were also shot, but according to the law these 
could not be taken from the State. W. H. M. 
In New Jetsey. 
Newton, N. J., Nov. 18. — We are now enjoying one of 
the most successful shooting seasons we have had in 
some time. Of quail there are many fine flocks of full- 
grown birds. Rabbits are plentiful. The woodcock flight 
this fall has been good, and the birds were all large and 
fat. We have a few English grouse up here in Sussex, 
and I was fortunate enough to flush a flock of six on Nov. 
I, killing one. They are not a very satisfactory bird to 
himt ; those I flushed would not lay to the dog. who fol- 
lowed them the whole breadth of a large stubble field, and 
finally flushed when they came to a stone fence ; they also 
make very long flights. The bird resembles a quail in 
many points, being about the size of a small ruffed grouse. 
Many of our local and city sportsmen are making fine 
bags daily. Among our most successful local sportsmen 
are A. B. Brickner, Lewis Morford, Theo. Morford, O. 
Westbrook, W. W. Woodward, Jr., Jas. E. Baldwin, R. 
Foster and O. Simpson, Jas. Baldwin, Jr. 
The Bloomingf Grove Park Case* 
Harkiseurg, Pa., Nov. "14. — Cases alleging violation of 
the Lacey National Game Law, which forbids game to be 
shipped out of the State unless properly labeled, brought 
six New York and New Jersey sportsmen, members of the 
Blooming Grove Park Association, of Pike county, before 
the United States District Court Grand Jury yesterday, 
and true bills were found against them. They will be 
tried at the March term of the Federal Court in Scranton, 
and from every indication there is to be a national fight 
and a thorough test made of the law. Former Auditor 
General Gregg and former Attorney General Kirkpatrick 
are attorneys for the defendants. 
Long Island Deer. 
The four days of Long Island deer hunting this season 
yielded a normal quota of heads and haunches. The 
youngest hunter to score a success was the fourteen-year- 
old son of Dr. Robinson, of Sayville, who had the luck 
and the nerve to bring down a big buck, and there was 
not a prouder and happier boy on Long Island. As illus- 
trating the good fortune of some favored hunters, it is 
-told that a bayman got one deer in the morning and a sec- 
ond one in the afternoon. 
mid ^tt^r ^mJjing, 
Proprietors of fishing resorts will find it profitable to advertise 
them in Forest and Stream. 
Can the Sea be Fished Out? 
From the Nineteentli Century, 
Is the harvest of the sea ever likely to be exhausted? 
This question has frequently been asked, especially since 
steam has so greatly increased man's power, not only 
of getting in the harvest, but of distributing it rapidly 
to places far away from the coasts. Steam has opened 
up fresh mines of fish food, and created fresh markets for 
it. 
The London papers of the 6th of April last published 
a note to this effect: 
EASTER FISH— A RECORD. 
The fish supply sent from Grimsby" on Wednesday for Easter 
surpasses all previous records, the supply of fresh cod and halibut 
being unprecedented. One railway alone, the Great Central, sent 
331 trucks, made up into several special trains. 
This was only a fraction of the supply sent to London, 
and London is only one of thousands of places to which 
supplies were sent and are sent continuall}^ How long 
will the sea be able to supply this great demand is a ques- 
tion which directly or indirectly affects everybody, inas- 
much as any increase or diminution of one kind of food 
must affect the price of other kinds. 
Until very recently it has generally been supposed that, 
immense as is the amount of fish life existing in the sea. 
there is a certain maximum beyond which Nature cannot 
go, a certain balance on which man can draw which she 
places to his credit on certain banks, limited both in 
number and extent. To make an overdraft on Nature's 
fish supply has long been co,nsidered by many well quali- 
fied to judge as not only possible but probable; they say. 
and there has been hitherto little but conjecture to contra- 
dict them, that as compared with its extent the ocean 
is a desert, a Sahara with a few oases on which alone 
fish life is possible. Further, they say that these oases 
are not only limited in extent, but also in their capability 
for supporting fish life, and that they are at the mercy 
of man, because they are confined to the comparatively 
shallow waters near the coasts on which he lives. 
That some kinds of sea fish, especially flat fish, can be 
practically exterminated in certain localities is proved by 
the fact that in many of the in-shore fisheries round our 
coasts it no longer pays tp fifh fpr them; and bppa^^se 
they have been destroyed and the fishermen have year 
by year to go farther afield, or rather afloat, in the pur- 
suit of them, it has been argued, on the ex pede Herculem 
basis, that eventually the limit of the fishing grounds and 
of the supply of fish will be reached. 
Not many years ago the lobster and crab fisheries on 
the East AngUan coasts were seriously threatened through 
over-fishing, and Sir Edward Birkbeck, to whom our sea 
fisheries generally owe so much for wise legislation in 
their interests, got an Act of Parliament passed for 
restricting and regulating the fishery. But what man 
does in the way of destroying a fishery is child's play 
as compared with Nature's work in that direction. 
Within the last year or two a countless octopus army 
has advanced along the northern coasts of France, and. 
for a time at any rate, absolutely destroyed the crab and 
lobster fisheries; lately we have heard of them on our 
own southwest coast. Some years ago the menhaden 
fishery of the South-Atlantic coast of the United States 
was almost destroyed by some submarine disturbance^ — 
for some time ships sailed through a sea of dead fish. 
But not all were destroyed, and Nature is refilling the 
void she had created. 
Some years ago a strange thing was witnessed on the 
most northerly coast oLScotland. For days a vast army 
of emaciated codfish, helpless, exhausted, drifted past 
with the current; one could only conjecture the reason 
for this pitiful procession. Had the fish been driven 
away from their usual feeding-grounds by the attacks of 
dog-fish or sharks or other sea pirates, or were they 
simply poor neighbors crowded out? 
Only of very recent years has the subject of mai-ine 
biology* been studied on any systematized plan, and with 
any definite object; but now that the North Sea has 
been mapped out for observation by an International 
committee of biologists representing the nations inter- 
ested in its fisheries, British, German, Dutch, Scandi- 
navian, etc., it is certain that we shall learn many things 
we did not know, and have to unlearn many things which 
we thought we knew to be facts, but which have proved 
to be fallacies. 
It would be difficult, fdr instance, to over-estimate the 
value of the discoveries made last summer by the Nor- 
wegian Marine Biological Expedition in the steamer 
Michael Sars, under the direction of Dr, Hjort, a most 
interesting account of which has recently been published 
by another Norwegian biologist, Dr. Knut Dahl. Dr. 
Dahl reminds us that as far back as history extends there 
have been accounts 01 great fluctuations in the results 
from the Norwegian fisheries. In the time ot the sons 
of Eric, the people almost perished of starvation owing 
to a total failure of the fisheries; they even sold their 
weapons to get food. The fisheries of Norway have 
always been subject to uncertainty, one season bringing 
a glut of fish to the coasts and the next perhaps a dearth 
of them. But never have the fisheries been worked so 
systematically and extensively as in recent .times, and 
never has the sea furnished such a large proportion of 
human food as at present, and never have the complaints 
that the sea would be fished out been so loud as of late. 
It is curious that this cry of the fisheries being 
destroyed and the sea fished out should be loudest at a 
period when the sea is giving us far greater supplies of 
•fish than ever man has had from it before. There must 
be some ground for this persistent protest which is heard 
— last year in England, this year in Germany or Scandi- 
navia, and presently we shall hear it again here. It is 
like the warning we in this country hear from time to 
time of the possibility of war bringing famine to our 
shores in place of foreign-grown bread. Never were 
bread and meat and fish and food of all kinds so cheap 
and plentiful as at present. 
According to Dr. Dahl the reason for the fear of ex- 
haustion of the sea fisheries rests on incorrect theories, 
due chiefly to the results of scientific investigations of 
the last forty years. Much the most important result in 
connection with this stibject was the discovery, during 
the present generation, that most of our sea-food fish 
produce an enormous number of eggs, serveral millions, 
and that these eggs after being laid ascend through the 
water, the milt of the male fish ascending with them and 
fertilizing them, and that they develop while floating just 
under the surface of the sea. When hatched the young 
fish is carried about for a time hither and thither by the 
currents until it comes near the coast, when it seeks the 
bottom, and gradually as it grows older wanders out into 
the depths. For this reason it was said that the young 
brood of the food-fishes was never to be met with clse- 
whe-re than in the immediate neighborhood of the coast, 
where the nets of the trawlers sweep it up and destroy 
it wholesale. 
Remembering, then, on the one hand that the mother 
fish produced an endless number of eggs, and on the 
other that a great proportion of these eggs is swept by 
the currents so far from land that the delicate brood when 
hatched would haA^e no chance of getting near any coa.st, 
it was supposed that Nature's object was that only a 
limited number of eggs should survive. The principle of 
reproduction must require these millions of eggs being 
spread over the surface of the sea — the greater part driven 
out into the sea to be destroyed, the smaller number 
which remained near the coasts to grow to be decimated 
by enemies and to sufiice finally to replace their parents 
in the ordinary course of Nature. 
The aim of Nature in this fish reproduction was only, 
it was supposed, to make good the loss, and this was 
so from the beginning. According to this view, there 
existed a fixed relation or proportion between the num- 
bers of each species, and reproduction only sufficed to 
maintain the balance between them. So soon as a new 
factor appeared, causing increased diminution in the 
numbers of a species, then the balance would be destroyed 
and could not, without artificial help, be set right again. 
The whole theory may be set out thus: 
a is the stock of fish with its chances of reproduction. 
b is the amount caught by man and the destroyed 
chances of reproduction of the fish caught. 
But, as Dr. Dahl points out, if this view was correct. 
* Oae of the^enost recent discoveries of Prof. Hensen, the Ger- 
man State marine biologist, is of bacteria which keep the sea fresh 
by attacking the surplus organic matter in it. Other researches 
in Plankton show that in some places the sea is a mass of liquid 
food, which fish and birds jnhale, as it were. Evpti round the 
Arctic and Antarctic Poles this minute life exist^ in such Ss 
(^HJH^^ity to permeate and color the seas, " 
the final result of abstracting b from a would long ago 
have been 0. "No, not yet; but it will come!" we are 
told. And in the meantime the fisheries exist, and have 
always existed, and never before were such quantifies 
of fish caught as now. 
The untenable nature of the theory referred to has led 
several investigators, as a result of their investigations 
into marine economics, to adopt widely different views 
and conclusions. In Great Britain Professor William C. 
Mcintosh, the leading British marine biologist, has 
strongly supported the view that the resources of the sea 
are practically inexhaustible; and in Norway Dr. Hjort 
and Dr. Dahl are stout apostles of the more hopeful 
prospect as regards our sea-food supply, and have 
demonstrated that a dearth of fish in some waters arises 
from the brood being carried away from them by cur- 
rents, but that the great mass of brood on the coasts, 
and the great multitudes of fish which periodically visit 
them, point to anything but to a general dearth of fish in 
the sea. They could not, it is true, until recently, give ' 
any direct proof of the riches of the sea, as a vessel and 
means for investigating the open sea were wanting; but 
last summer, in the newly built fishing steamer Michael 
Sars, they were able to carry out experiments in the 
Norwegian seas and the Skager Rack, and to make what, 
in the opinion of Dr. Dahl, belongs to the most important 
zoological discoveries of the nineteenth century, and 
which justifies the hope that we are within measurable 
distance of the solution of many vexed questions in con- 
nection with our fisheries. 
An Undreamt-of Discovery, 
Undoubtedly the most important result of Dr. Hjort's 
researches was that he found the brood (fry) of all our 
round food-fishes in immeasurable quantities, not dead, 
as it ought to be in theory, but alive, and spread over 
the whole Norwegian sea and the Skager Rack. No one 
had the least idea that this was the case. That the young 
of cod, haddock, coal-fish and whiting could live out in 
the open sea would have been considered impossible a 
year ago. It was thought that they were only to be 
found quite in-shore near the coasts, as that was the 
only place where they had been found. 
Dr. Hjort's discovery shows that theie are many mil- 
lion times more young fish in the sea than man had any 
idea of, and the theory that the young brood carried out 
to sea perished is proved to be a fable. Nature is shown 
in her true light, not as the unnatural step-mother 
destroying all but a favored few of the brood of our food- 
fishes, but as designing that as great a number as possible 
should come to maturity. We now know that the rear- 
ing grounds of the young fry are not restricted to certain 
limited areas near coasts, but extend to the open sea 
itself. We may well exclaim with Spenser — 
Ohi what an endless work has he in hand 
Who'd count the sea's abmidant progeny, 
Whose fruitful seed far passeth that on land, . 
And also theirs that roam in th' azure sky. 
So fertile be the floods in generation, 
So vast their numbers, and so numberless tlieit nation. 
In view of this discovery, as Dr. Dahl says, all former 
speculations as to the exhaustibility of our sea fish supply 
fall to the ground. 
But it was not only fish brood or fry that Dr. Hjort 
found in his investigations of the North Sea. He made 
the further remarkable discovery that away out in the 
open sea, where it was several thousands of metres in 
depth, he found fish, as it were, in layers or ocean strata. 
Some required a line as long as the Monument to reach 
down to them, others were in still lower depths' which 
would submerge St. Paul's and the Monument on top, 
and with many thousand Leet of water below them. 
There, in these still and dark and hitherto supposed 
barren regions of the sea, he caught great cod and had- 
dock and coal-fish, sometimes in quantities. The im- 
portance of this discovery is that it proves that not on^' 
fish brood, but mature fish, also, exist out in the ocean, 
and that what have been looked upon as typical "ground 
fish" and "local" sorts are to be found at other places, 
as well as near the coasts. Not of least significance is 
the finding oi cod in the deep places of the sea, as in this 
discovery we have the key to solve the mystery as to 
where the cod abides when he withdraws from the coasts. 
In the great cod fisheries off the coast of Newfouudland 
the fishermen find the fish at the commencement of the 
season in April in the shallow water near shore, and use 
lines of thirty or forty feet, increasing the depth as they 
find the fish receding, until they have to fish at over two 
hundred feet for them in December. 
It was formerly supposed that the killing of a cod in 
roe meant the destruction of more than two million 
potential codfish. Now, as Dr. Dahl says, it merely 
looks like improving the life-chances of the progeny of 
anothei- cod. Formerly it was considered that the fish 
production of the sea was a fixed quantity, which was 
being continually decreased by man's inroads on it. Now 
it would appear to be an organism on which the attacks 
of man can make no real impression. It seems probable, 
indeed, that In every second, every minute, and every 
day more fish is produced in the sea than all humanity 
combined could devour in the same time. 
Who knows? At any rate, the marine biological in- 
vestigators of the new century need have no fear that 
the ocean will not continue at least to provide them food 
for reflection. The more success they have like the dis- 
covery which Dr. Dahl has described (which applies 
more or less to the whole of the seas of the world), the 
more will governments, and let us hope ours among them, 
be inclined to encourage and support their efforts by 
substantial "grants in aid." It is a disgrace to our nation, 
depending so entirely as we do upon the sea for our 
existence, that we do less than almost any nation to en- 
courage and support our fisheries, both inland and sea.* 
Apart from the question of national defence — for our 
fishing fleets afford the finest recruiting ground for our 
fighting fleet; — no one who knows the benefits which the 
United States of America derive from the great National 
and State Fisheries Departments but must regret that 
the United Kingdom does practically nothing in this way 
* A correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette at Antwerp, writing 
recently says: "Few realize that eight millions sterling is ex- 
tracted fro?n the North Sea in fisb, and fewer still, perhaps, ^h%^ 
jaorc th»^ half this great sum w s^cwr^d by Englan<j^" " 
