OYSTERS: A LEADING FISHERY PRODUCT 
219 
Photograph from Dr. Hugh M. Smith 
OYSTERS GROWING WITHIN AND ON A YEAST- 
POWDER BOTTLE 
In America and England the general practice is to use old 
oyster-shells as cultch, but in France and Holland the spat is 
generally collected on concave earthenware tiles. It is necessary 
to detach the oysters from the tiles before they are a year old, 
and, as this could not be done without injury were the young 
directly attached to the hard tile, a coating of lime or soft mortar 
is used to cover the tile, and from it the oysters can be easily re¬ 
moved with a sharp knife. 
yearly increasing crop that will 
keep pace with the increasing 
demand. 
Of the oysters marketed last 
year, 50 per cent came from 
private or cultivated grounds. 
Owing, however, to the im¬ 
provement in the quality and 
shape of oysters by cultivation, 
the product of the private beds 
represented 70 per cent of the 
total value of the yield of 
market oysters. While the 
quantity of oysters taken from 
cultivated grounds in the 
United States is larger than in 
all the remainder of the world, 
yet the proportion of such 
oysters to the total output is 
much smaller than in any other 
important oyster-producing 
country. 
Wherever the fishery is ac¬ 
tive and the demand great, the 
necessity for artificial meas¬ 
ures to maintain the supply 
sooner or later becomes mani¬ 
fest. Some of the States long 
since ceased to place reliance 
on natural beds as sources of 
supply, and encouraged oyster 
culture by leasing or selling all 
available grounds to prospec¬ 
tive oyster farmers, and each 
year other States are falling 
in line for progressive methods. 
The American oyster in¬ 
dustry has been greatly re¬ 
tarded in one of the most im¬ 
portant regions by the failure 
of the States to adapt them¬ 
selves to existing conditions 
and by their deep-seated preju¬ 
dice against innovations based 
on modern conceptions and 
experience. 
Nowhere in this country is 
there any excuse for continuing to rely on 
public oyster grounds as sources of supply, 
and the proposition to discourage or pro¬ 
hibit individual control of land for agri¬ 
cultural purposes would not be less absurd 
than to prevent or retard the acquisi¬ 
tion of submerged lands for aquicultural 
purposes. 
The prosperous condition of our oyster 
industry at present is directly due to the 
more general acceptance of more rational 
standards as regards oyster culture, and 
it is only a question of a few years when 
there will be unanimous recognition, as 
an orthodox fact, of what a short time 
ago would have been regarded as the 
rankest economic heresy, namely, that 
natural oyster-beds as a general propo¬ 
sition are to be considered nuisances, 
whose perpetuation delays progress and 
impairs the prosperity of the oyster 
industry. 
