13 
Under the circumstances the advocates of oyster-culture 
legislation turned to the inland counties for help, secured the 
support of Western Maryland and Baltimore city by glowing 
pictures of a great revenue to the State and by coupling up 
the good-roads proposition with the oyster-leasing proposi- 
tion, and after repeated fights, in 1906 passed the so-called 
Haman Bill, providing for a scientific survey of the waters of 
the State and for a system of leasing those bottoms found 
after the survey to be barren. 
It is always easy, after a system has been in operation for 
a number of years, to point out the places in which the orig- 
inal plan might have been improved. It does not follow that 
the one who suggests such improvements would have had 
the wisdom to see them at the time or would in fact have 
done anything different from what was done had he himself 
been in charge. It is with no thought of criticism, therefore, 
that attention is here called to certain features of the Haman 
Act which, in the light of subsequent developments, would 
seem capable of improvement. 
The first of these was a failure to include within the bill 
itself a definition of a natural bar. ‘The Commission which 
was appointed to make the survey was directed to mark out 
and indicate by permanent buoys the boundaries of the natural 
oyster bar of Maryland, but the old dispute between the advo- 
cates of oyster culture and the natural-rock oystermen as to 
what constituted a natural bar was left undetermined. As a 
matter of fact, bottoms on the Chesapeake Bay may be divided 
roughly into four classes: (a), those on which oysters have 
not grown and cannot be made to grow; (b), those upon which 
oysters have not grown but can be made to grow; (c), those 
on which oysters have grown (as evidenced by the presence 
of shells) but which for one reason or another contain now 
so small a number of oysters as to make the bar unprofitable 
to work; (d), those on which oysters are growing at the pres- 
ent time in sufficient abundance to make the bar profitable 
to work. Oystermen generally classify “a” as barren bottom 
and “‘b,” “c” and “d” as natural bar. Advocates of oyster 
culture, on the other hand, classify “a,” “b” and “c” as barren 
bottom and “d” as natural bar. The dispute was an old one, 
