OUR HERITAGE OF THE FRESH WATERS 
81 
of dollars. The trade 
in angling equipment 
alone is extensive. 
Who can measure 
the health and esthetic 
values attendant upon 
the angling idea? Some 
one has recently as¬ 
serted that the angling 
habit is conducive to 
long life, and, begin¬ 
ning with Izaak Wal¬ 
ton, who lived to be 
ninety, presents a 
lengthy list of cele¬ 
brated fishermen who 
lived well into the 
eighties and nineties, 
many of them promi¬ 
nent in the literature 
of American -angling. 
Fresh-water fish cul¬ 
ture in the United 
States has been carried 
on for more than fifty 
years in steadily in¬ 
creasing volume, in the 
effort to keep pace with 
a depletion by fishery 
industries that con¬ 
stantly threaten ex¬ 
haustion of the fish 
supply. 
POLLUTION A DANGER¬ 
OUS MENACE 
The great fishery 
problem of the time 
in our country is the 
pollution of the fresh 
waters by innumerable 
agencies, rapidly affect¬ 
ing their productiveness. Unless stern 
measures are introduced by law to correct 
this, soon one of our great natural eco¬ 
nomic gifts will be seriously stricken. 
When we consider that the market catch 
in the Great Lakes alone sometimes ex¬ 
ceeds 100,000,000 pounds a year, that 
legions of anglers are overfishing the Trout 
and Bass streams everywhere, and that 
pollution of the rivers by manufacturing 
industries has reached appalling propor¬ 
tions, it is apparent that our heritage of 
the waters is endangered to a serious 
degree. 
lush culture alone cannot save it, even 
if greatly increased. We are already 
Photograph from U. S. Bureau of Fisheries 
THE MAGNIFIED SCALE OF A DOG SALMON 
This scale was taken from a mature male in its fourth year. Note 
the “rings,” like those of the cross-section of a tree, by means of which 
the age of a fish can now be computed. 
wasting expensive propagation work in 
stocking waters no longer suitable for 
fish life, and many streams have been 
abandoned to their fate. One could name 
a score of rivers in mining and manu¬ 
facturing States, once contributing to the 
food supply, that now contain no living 
thing—no fish or Mussel or Crayfish, 
not even the air-breathing Frog. These 
rivers represent damaged resources and 
there are others that may soon be like 
them. 
Reforms come so slowly that the great 
cleaning-up task ahead of the American 
people is not likely to be undertaken seri¬ 
ously until conditions become intolerable. 
