GENERAL MEETINGS. 
53 
sand eggs; a perch, a herring, or a shad, thirty thousand eggs; a 
pike, one hundred thousand eggs; a carp, four hundred thousand 
eggs; a mackerel, five hundred thousand eggs; a flounder, one 
million eggs; a haddock, one million and a half of eggs; a halibut, 
two and a half millions of eggs; a pollock, four million eggs; a cod¬ 
fish of medium size, five million eggs; a large-sized cod, nine million 
eggs, and a turbot, nine million eggs. Such numbers are simply 
astounding; they cannot be realized. And how great the marvel 
w'hen we consider that each of these nine million units is a potential 
fish, capable of development into all the perfected attributes and 
functions of the parent form! Among the lower invertebrates may 
be simply instanced the oyster—capable of producing the incredible 
number of twenty or thirty million eggs, and if of large size as many 
as forty or fifty million eggs. 
If with this amazing fertility the various kinds of fish just named 
are not rapidly increasing, but are stationary or even decreasing in 
numbers, how overwhelming must be their early destruction. Even 
after allowing for the many millions of adult fish taken by man it 
is obvious that of many species not one in a thousand or in ten thou¬ 
sand of eggs or of the newly hatched can survive to maturity. Pro¬ 
fessor Mobius estimates that for every grown oyster upon the beds 
of Schleswig-Holstein more than a million have died. 
To avert, if possible, the menace of increasing scarcity of fish 
supply the attention of Congress was directed to the subject;—the 
more properly since in our National Government resided the juris¬ 
diction over our extended sea coasts. By a joint resolution, approved 
February 9, 1871, the President was authorized and required to 
appoint a person of proved scientific and practical acquaintance with 
the fishes of the coast to be Commissioner of Fishes and Fisheries, 
with the duty to prosecute investigations into the causes of diminu¬ 
tion, if any, in numbers of the food-fishes of the coast and the lakes 
of the United States, and to report whether any and what protective, 
prohibitory, or precautionary measures should be adopted in the 
premises. 
No man more suitable for this important and responsible position 
than Professor Baird could have been selected. He was at once 
appointed by President Grant and confirmed by the Senate as the 
Commissioner. In his first report he announced, as the result of a 
most careful and thorough examination, that the decrease of the 
shore fishes of the New^England waters during the preceding twenty 
