8 
OYSTER BEDS OF JAMES RIVER, VIRGINIA. 
The Baylor survey was of an entirely different character from 
that conducted by Winslow. It was in no sense an examination of 
the oyster beds themselves, but primarily and avowedly a delimitation 
of boundaries which included the recognized or reputed oyster-bear- 
ing bottom, as pointed out by local commissioners or representa- 
tives of each oyster-producing county. It is the writer’s understand- 
ing that the county commissioners were, under the state law ordering 
the survey, the final arbiters with whom rested the decision whether 
or not a given area should be included within the boundaries of the 
public grounds. So far as can be learned no examinations whatever 
were made on the beds, the commissioners using their judgment and 
local knowledge in selecting the corners and the engineers with their 
theodolites cutting in the points indicated from stations on the shore. 
Whether or not beds were omitted from the confines of the public 
grounds so located can not now be satisfactorily determined, owing 
to the development of the planting industry, outside of the Baylor 
lines, on all or most of the available bottom. It is evident, however, 
that in the region under discussion no very extensive rocks were dis- 
regarded, and a comparison of the results of the recent survey with 
that of 1892 shows that the Baylor lines, considered as a broad 
scheme of delimitation, conform closely with the general distribution 
of the rocks. At several places, notably on Gun and Kettle Hole 
rocks, parts of the natural beds undoubtedly fell outside of the lines, 
but the writer hazards the suggestion that this may not have been 
through inadvertence but because those parts of the rocks may have 
been already taken up as private holdings. 
It has been claimed, and Mr. Baylor himself has so stated in 
official communications to the State, that a very considerable area 
of barren bottom, amounting to many thousand acres, was included 
within the public grounds. That this should be so, under the sys- 
tem adopted by the local commissioners and under the desire to 
assure the inclusion of all naturally productive bottom, was inevi- 
table. Moreover, the boundaries of the beds are irregular curves, 
while the including surveyed boundaries must be straight lines, for 
purposes of administration and policing as long and unbroken as 
possible. To have excluded the greater part of this barren bottom 
would have necessitated a careful location of the natural rocks and 
the breaking up of the public grounds into a considerable number 
of small or moderate areas instead of segregating them into a few 
large ones. 
To what extent the claim that great areas of barren bottom are 
included in the public grounds is justified will appear from the accom- 
panying charts and in the following descriptions and discussions. 
