9 
at a minimum price. A packing house, for example, which 
could take up sufficient acreage could stock this area with 
cheap oysters in the late spring or early fall and draw from 
it, through its own employees working on a daily wage basis, 
an adequate supply of marketable stock throughout the entire 
season. ‘The oystermen had visions of themselves reduced to 
the alternative of abandoning the business or of accepting em- 
ployment at day’s wages from the packing houses, with the 
constant liability of being dismissed at the whim of the em- 
ployer. Not unnaturally, they preferred the existing situa- 
tion, in which they worked as their own masters. 
This fear of domination by capital is responsible for the 
five-acre limit, but from the first this attempted restriction 
of the area held was unsuccessful. John Smith might hold 
only five acres, but John Smith’s wife took another five, and 
his brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts took five each 
(and if his stock of relatives was not sufficient his employees 
were pressed into service), so that even under the old system 
contiguous holdings of 30, 40 or 100 acres, under a multitude 
of names, it is true, but to all intents and purposes by a single 
individual, were not uncommon. 
The third of these ideas was a failure to recognize any 
necessity or possibility of oyster culture as contrasted with 
oyster bedding. Oyster bedding consists in putting down 
upon a given piece of bottom oysters taken from the natural 
bed or bar with the intention of allowing them to grow or 
fatten and later taking up the same oysters for market pur- 
poses. In theory, at least, the character of the bottom is not 
changed by this operation, and at the close of it, excepting for 
those oysters which have died during the period or those 
which have escaped the dredge or tongs, the ground returns 
to its natural condition. Oyster culture proper, on the other 
hand, consists in covering a piece of non-producing bottom 
with material to which the oyster spat, present at the breed- 
ing season in all of the saline waters of the Bay and its trib- 
utaries, will cling. This captured spat develops in a period 
averaging probably about three years into marketable oysters. 
But from year to year the catch of spat is repeated, so that 
at the end of the three years the bottom carries not merely 
