14 
but definitions had been carefully avoided in the past by the 
Legislature, and the only adjudications of the point had been 
in some of the lower courts of the State, so that no final pro- 
nouncement had been made. The question was undoubtedly 
left to the Commission, because the attempt to solve it in the 
Legislature would have precipitated a struggle whose extent 
and final outcome could not have been foreseen, but the failure 
to include such a definition in the Act was largely responsible 
for the later development of a struggle which was perhaps 
equally as disastrous. 
The second of these features was the acceptance by the 
friends of oyster culture of a large number of restrictive pro- 
visions, each of which made it more and more improbable that 
the early attempts at oyster culture would be successful or 
that the system would produce the revenue which had been 
promised the inland counties as the reward for forcing it 
upon the tidewater counties. ‘The first of these, a concession 
to the fear of monopoly, restricted leasable areas to ten acres 
within the territorial limits of the counties and a hundred 
acres in the open Bay. The second restricted lessees to resi- 
dents of Maryland and excluded any corporation or joint stock 
company from any holding of land in the State for oyster 
planting or cultivation. 
The third was the elimination of the provisions giving the 
lessee the right to work the land rented by him in any manner 
and at any time he might see fit. Under the law, as enacted 
and as interpreted by the administrative bodies of the State, 
it was extremely difficult to secure small oysters for planting 
purposes, and it was extremely difficult to work the beds once 
planted because the planter was subject to all of the restric- 
tive regulations devised for the protection of natural bars as 
to seasons and hours and as to the use of power-vessels, ete. 
Oyster culture, other than mere oyster bedding, was in 
Maryland a new business, and an Act which restricted the 
experiment to individual capital, forbidding a division of the 
risk among a corporate group; restricted the areas so that the 
reward of a successful experimenter was too small to attract 
individuals of sufficient means to afford to experiment; and 
hampered the lessee by the requirement that he use anti- 
