Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/86

74 It should be stated here that the meshes of every purse seine employed in the menhaden industry are two and seven eighths inches square, so that it is practically impossible to capture any immature fishes in these nets.

Aside from the operations of the factories, menhaden are used as bait for food fishes; a small quantity is salted and exported to the West Indies, where it is eaten by the negroes; and many more are plowed into the soil by farmers along the Atlantic coast, as has been the custom for centuries.

The question of the menhaden being used as food by the food fishes is practically disposed of by Dr. Bean, the ichthyologist of the United States Fish Commission, who testified that, having examined the stomachs of numbers of bluefish and other food fishes, he failed to find any evidence of the menhaden except in the form in which it is used as a bait for "chumming," and only in a very few cases was it present at all. Mr. Atwood, of Bristol County, Massachusetts, whose experience as a practical fisherman extends back to 1816, makes the following interesting statement:

"The great changes in our fisheries have been caused by the bluefish. . . . When they first appeared in our bay I was living at Long Point (Provincetown), in a little village containing some two hundred and seventy population, engaged in the net fishery. The bluefish affected our fishing (mackerel, menhaden, etc.) so much that the people were obliged to leave the place. Family after family moved away, leaving that locality, which is now a desolate, barren, and sandy waste." Passing over the depredations of the bluefish, Mr. Atwood says, "I firmly believe there is no necessity for the passage of any general legislative act for the protection or regulation of our sea fish and fisheries."

J. M. Rimbaud, a famous French ichthyologist and practical fisherman, says that the migratory fishes can not be diminished by overfishing; but that local fishes might be exterminated by constantly fishing for them. The Royal Commission appointed by Her Britannic Majesty's Government to inquire into the condition of the fisheries of Great Britain and Ireland, which consisted of Prof. Thomas Henry Huxley, Right Hon. James Caird, and the Right Hon. George Shaw Lefevre, after three years of exhaustive inquiry reported: "We advise that all acts of Parliament which profess to regulate or restrict the modes of fishing pursued in the open sea be repealed, and that unrestricted freedom of fishing be pursued hereafter." I heard Prof. Huxley state positively, in 1883, that after many years of study of the question he had come to the conclusion that the supply of migratory fishes, especially the herring, was inexhaustible.

I think I have now told enough about the non-edible fish