Commercial Products of the Sea. 
73 
tauk Point, where only boat-fishing from shore is practised, 
the American whaling industry is now confined to a steam 
fleet from San Francisco. 
No longer are immense menhaden seines hauled in 
during the summer upon our every shore. The steamers 
of Tiverton and Greenport have now a virtual monopoly 
of this business. In my boyhood the sea-side farms of all 
New England were fertilized by menhaden, spread broad¬ 
cast and planted in the corn-hills. Now these fish are 
converted by machinery into painters’ oil—supposed to be 
from linseed—or into a so-called guano. And so with the 
scup fishery: from being merely the luxury of local homes, 
the scup have become the pursuit of a fleet of steamers, 
making its headquarters at Newport, and carrying these 
fish by the thousand barrels to New York and Philadelphia 
Formerly almost the whole catch in the mackerel fishery 
was made by hand upon sailing vessels and thereon salted 
and barreled. Now, by the use of purse-seines, great 
quantities are taken by the menhaden steamers and car¬ 
ried directly to the markets. In the lobster fishery, while 
canning is employed with profit at points most distant 
from dense population, the demand by cities for fresh lob¬ 
sters has come to exceed the supply. 
The changes referred to have by no means proved evils. 
With each problem there has followed its solution. The 
sea is so prolific of life that with due precautions it is 
really inexhaustible. Great scarcity for one or more years 
has but preceded an unusual superabundance, and where 
species have proved confined, in the main, to narrow limits 
their threatened extermination has been prevented by the 
process of applied science, in the artificial propagation and 
successive implantation of fish at the expense of the State 
and the National governments, chiefly through the United 
States Fish Commission. Not only have our fresh-water 
streams and lakes been thus stocked, but the sea itself 
and its tidal estuaries. As I write, word has come of a 
most unexpected and plenteous appearance of large cod 
