Feb. 26, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
341 
tata; the celebrant sings the mass and the choir 
or congregation sings the responses. Person¬ 
ally, I have never attended at a more solemn 
or impressive celebration. On that peaceful 
Sabbath morning the gentle west wind, the song 
birds in their “leafy pillared chorus,” the musi¬ 
cally murmuring waters of the slow-flowing 
Triton, the very trees—yea, even the distant 
hills seemed to stop" and listen and note the 
ancient and mystic rite and join the song of 
prayer and praise that arose from the rude 
camp altar and ascended as incense to the kindly 
skies, and let us hope to the Throne of Mercy 
of Him as the poet sings, who is 
“The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused, 
Sustains and is the life of all that lives.’’ 
As an offertory the whole congregation led by 
the padre sang “Nearer sny God to Thee” and 
as the sacred chant rose through the trees and 
out over the placid waters on that peaceful, 
sunny Sabbath morning amidst the beautiful sur¬ 
roundings, the scene was impressive beyond de¬ 
scription. W. J. Carroll. 
The First Big Fish. 
I have always been a fisherman. My early 
years were passed in a village lying along the 
bank of the Oswego River, below the falls. In 
those days a little settlement above the falls was 
known as the Upper Landing, and the village 
as the Lower Landing, designations handed 
down from a time when a portage had to be 
made at the falls. 
My first fishing was done with a bent pin 
attached to a bit of string and was confined to 
a waterpail. Then from the rain water barrel, 
where I often fished for a frog which made 
it his home, I was promoted to the mill pond 
creek lying east of the village, and eventually 
was permitted to visit the banks of the Oswego 
canal and angle for perch and rock bass. 
On a memorable day in 1866 I captured my 
first large fish in the Oswego River and became 
a full fledged brother of the angle. The mullet 
were running up from Lake Ontario in large 
numbers and the lower bridge was lined with 
fishermen, a few armed with spears, to which 
a rope was attached, and with which they landed 
fish from the water twenty feet or more below 
them, but the majority were bait fishermen. 
I had knotted two small lines together, but 
had only a few more feet than was necessary to 
reach the water close to the bridge. I had no 
bait, but found a dead helgramite—crab we 
called it—on the flooring of the bridge where 
it had been thrown by an older fisherman. Bait¬ 
ing my hook, I dropped it into the water and 
was soon rewarded by a tug at the line. I 
hauled the fish over the railing with difficulty, 
and running the fingers of each hand under his 
gills, started for home, neglecting in my ex¬ 
citement to remove the hook, the line dragging 
behind me. The fish was a large mullet and its 
tail would drag on the ground, despite me. 
I have taken many fish since then, but I have 
never felt the thrill of joy which came with my 
first large fish. Sandy. 
All the fish laws of the United States and 
Canada, revised to date and noiv in force, are 
given in the Game Laws in Brief. See adv. 
Work of the International Fisheries 
Commission/'' 
1 he International Fisheries Commission rep¬ 
resents a most interesting effort to settle at once 
a number of problems in international law, in 
constitutional law, in conflict of laws, in equity, 
and at the same time in biology, for no statute 
can be effective unless the nature of the indi¬ 
vidual species, its food, its distribution and its 
habits are primarily and persistently kept' in 
view. 
The boundary waters of the United States 
and Canada include two of the greatest fishing 
aieas of the world. The Great Lakes constitute 
the greatest body of fresh water belonging to 
any single system, and are richer in fish life 
than any other. Puget Sound and the adjacent 
waters are part of the great Alaskan system, 
the region of all the world richest in salmon. 
In these boundary waters the statutes of the 
Dominion of Canada, those of the different 
ptovinces and those of the different States of 
the American Union are more or less at cross 
purposes with each other. Over Lake Erie, for 
example the richest of the lakes in fisheries— 
four States and one province claim jurisdiction, 
with the greatest variation in theory and prac¬ 
tice of fish protection. In the treaty of April 
11, 1908, an attempt is made to remedy this con¬ 
dition of affairs by the adoption by Great Britain 
and the United States of identical statutes re¬ 
lating to the fisheries, these statutes to hold for 
a period of four years without change, except 
by the joint action of both nations. Under this 
treaty two commissioners have been appointed 
to draw up this code of fishery statutes. These 
are Hon. Samuel Tovel Bastedo, of Toronto, as 
representative of Great Britain, and the present 
writer as representative of the United States. 
It is agreed that the code shall be submitted to 
both nations for adoption by the 1st of January, 
: 909 - [This has been done. —Ed.] 
This treaty involves a number of interesting 
principles: (1) Joint international action in the 
case of migratory animals moving from waters 
of one nation to those of another in place of 
national control on the two sides of the boun¬ 
dary; (2) substitution of international legisla¬ 
tion in this regard for that of the several prov¬ 
inces, States and counties; (3) the code of 
statutes must depend on the nature of the dif¬ 
ferent species of animals it is designed to pro¬ 
tect, the matter becoming at bottom one of 
natural history. 
In nearly all cases the final key'to the situa¬ 
tion is found in artificial propagation—the de¬ 
velopment of the hatchery. This demands, how¬ 
ever, men who are willing to study their busi¬ 
ness and to learn thoroughly the nature of the 
fishes concerned—the egg, the fry and the adult. 
Artificial hatching is not a process. It is an 
art, and like all arts it must rest on science. 
How much of the money spent on hatcheries has 
been wholly wasted no one can tell, but the 
amount is considerable. And the value of any 
hatchery is determined not by the nominal out¬ 
put of eggs and fry, but by the brains put into 
the business. Each species of fish, like each 
plant in the garden, has its own nature and must 
be met on its own ground. It is set in its ways 
♦Read by David Starr Jordan, International Fisheries 
Commissioner, before the International Fishery Congress. 
and will not conform to the habits of any other 
species. 
1 he species of fishes affected by this legisla¬ 
tion are numerous, but they can be grouped into 
about six types, as represented by the herring, 
the whitefish, the red salmon of the Pacific, the 
black bass, the walleye and the sturgeon. 
The herring is a marine fish existing in in¬ 
calculable numbers and swarming by the million 
in many places on both shores of the North 
Atlantic. The catch of herring in navigable 
waters is less than a drop in the bucket, and 
the fishery statutes must concern the protection 
and regulation of the fishing industry rather 
than the conservation of the herring itself. 
The whitefish is a type of a group of fishes, 
part of them the helpless prey of the preda¬ 
tory fishes, the rest feeding freely on other 
forms, but all spawning in cooling waters, most¬ 
ly in November. The eggs are large, free and 
easily manipulated, so that they can be readily 
cared for by processes of artificial propagation. 
By caring for these eggs perhaps twenty times 
as many young can be returned to the lake as 
would develop naturally. The best protection 
to such fishes is that of a size limit, forbidding 
the buying or selling of all that have not reached 
the degree of maturity involved in the second 
appearance on the spawning grounds. These 
fishes are fit for the table while the spawning 
process is going on. To forego catching them 
for a month or so before the spawning period, 
then to allow free fishing for adult fish on the 
part of those fishermen prepared to preserve the 
spawn, is the best means of maintaining and 
increasing fisheries of this type. By this pro¬ 
cess the adult fishes are regarded as a ripened 
crop, which is removed to make way for the 
crop of next year. In this regard we already 
see every prospect of success in the Great Lakes, 
as even under present conditions, with the pres¬ 
ent hatchery facilities, the number of fishes of 
this kind is steadily increasing. 
To another category belongs the salmon of 
the Pacific coast, which feed in the sea, spawn 
in the rivers, ascending the streams for the most 
part when four years old, all individuals, male 
and female, dying soon after the first spawning. 
In this case the fish are valuable only when about 
to leave the sea, or in the lower courses of the 
rivers. When the spawn and milt are ripe the 
flesh of the fish is worthless. Iflere the prob¬ 
lem is to allow fish enough to escape the nets 
and to ascend the rivers to cover the spawning 
grounds and to keep the hatcheries occupied. 
The most valuable of these species in interna¬ 
tional waters, the red salmon spawns only in 
streams at the head of lakes. In Puget Sound 
the supply has been greatly depleted by over¬ 
fishing. Under such circumstances nothing is 
gained by statutes regulating the size of fish. 
The only thing to be done is to establish sea¬ 
sonal or weekly closed periods when a certain 
large number shall have opportunity to pass up 
to the lakes. In this case nearly all the spawn¬ 
ing grounds are in Canadian territory in the 
tributaries of Fraser River. 
The black bass is the type of still another 
group of fishes. The male bass maintains his 
own hatchery. The eggs cannot be stripped 
and hatched by artificial means. The male fish 
builds a nest and the fertilized eggs are de¬ 
posited in it. Then he stands guard over them, 
driving away all intruders, including the mother 
