19 
The law did not attempt to fix the method by which the 
examination should be conducted, leaving all of the details to 
be developed by the Commission. The method actually 
adopted was extremely thorough. | 
The first indication of a natural oyster bed is the presence 
of shell upon the bottom. ‘This can be readily detected either 
by soundings or by the use of a drag. The drag selected by 
the survey consisted of a short chain attached to a relatively 
light line held in the hands of an experienced operator. A 
small boat equipped with a chain-drag of this sort, with an 
adequate supply of small buoys and with apparatus for sound- 
ing, was sailed over the area claimed as the natural bar in 
two sets of parallel courses at right angles to each other, each 
line extended out to the point where the chain-drag no longer 
indicated the presence of shell. The boat carried engineers, 
who located its position every twenty seconds, and at each of 
these locations a sounding was made and the depth of the 
water and the character of the bottom recorded. Where the 
indications from the chain and the soundings were favorable, 
small numbered buoys were dropped and anchored, the posi- 
tion at which they were anchored being recorded by the engi- 
neers. This surveying boat was followed by a tonging boat, 
which stopped at each of the numbered buoys and covered 
a definite area of the bottom at that point, recording the num- 
ber of oysters of marketable size, the number of culls and 
any indications of a catch of spat. All of these records were 
then platted upon the map of that particular locality, so that 
the Commission had before it, when it came to pass judg- 
ment, an accurate picture of the condition of the bottom at 
definite points distributed at frequent intervals over the entire 
area claimed as natural bar. The Commission would there- 
upon mark out as natural bar an area including all of the loca- 
_ tions which came up to the adopted standard or gave promise 
of coming up to that standard in the near future. 
Considered as a survey of tonging areas, only two possible 
objections could be urged to this method. The first was that 
the local oystermen selected by the county might not remem- 
ber to point out all of the natural oyster beds within the 
county waters. This, to some extent, was obviated by the 
