Before closing this work we will say a few words concerning nets and the dangers that follow unrestricted net fishing. When the country was sparsely populated, and fish were abundant, the most ready and effectual methods of capturing them were the best. Now that all kinds of fish have become scarce, and some have disappeared altogether, limits must be placed on their destruction, and the kinds of nets and sizes of mesh must be regulated, or the supply will soon be utterly exhausted. There are strong and blindly selfish interests opposed to all legislation in such direction, but the public welfare is paramount and must prevail. If we are to have fish much longer abundant with us the use of nets must be regulated by law. Of all nets the most fatal are the pounds.

Pound nets are so called from a sort of trap or pound made of netting at their outermost extremity, so arranged that fish can enter it, but cannot escape. To this trap is attached a long wing or wall of netting, and it has mesh fine enough to prevent the passage of the smallest fish which are only used and only fit for manure, the mesh not being over one and a quarter inches stretched, or three quarters of an inch between knots. The wing reaches from the trap, which is either located in the channel or adjacent to it, well up ashore, and is hung on stakes driven firmly into the ground. It is sometimes six miles long, and has sometimes six traps at intervals of a mile each, and is never taken up after once it is set, except for a change of location, or old boreas removes them without permission of the owners. The plan of operation is this; A school of fish, or a single individual running into a harbor - for it is such localities that are usually selected - strikes against the wing, and is arrested in his course. Sometimes he turns back and goes to sea again. Timid fishes are often driven off in this manner, and never return, doing no good to the pound fishermen, nor to those who might have captured them in more legitimate ways. But if they are bold and determined they will push on, following the obstruction to its outer end, with the intention of passing around it. They are frequently of the class of migratory fishes which must change their element, and will strive by every means to overcome obstacles, or they may be shore varieties which are seeking some bay or shallow creek in which to spawn, and which it is very desirable should not be frustrated in their purpose. They swim cautiously, but perseveringly, along the wall of netting, but when they come to the end, instead of passing around it they are conducted into the trap, from which there is no escape, and where they await the arrival of the fisherman, who usually raises and empties his pound once or twice a day.

This simple statement of the plan of operation shows its great destructiveness. It is fishing all the while * day and night its victims are being led into the fatal traps. Nothing that comes along can escape, unless it be the timorous varieties, whose alarm carries them at once back to their haunts of safety and out of the reach of man. It is an inexpensive engine of piscatorial warfare as fatal to the masses of fish life as to the single individual voyaging alone. No one would object if there were fish enough for it and for the neighboring residents beside. Were that the case, it would be a convenient and effectual method of supplying the markets, but this is not the case, and while pound nets misappropriate the common stock, they overwork the fisheries, however prolific they may be, and in the end exhaust the supply. The more fish there are, the more are taken ; none escape but the very few who follow the exact center of the channel. Not enough are left to keep up the breed, the habits of spawning are directly interfered with, the fishing begins to deteriorate, it never lasts but a few years, and at the close leaves that entire section of water absolutely bare of fish, dependent upon accident or the laborious efforts of man for its possible restoration.

Against this unfair appropriation of public property, the people have a manifest right to protest and legislate, and the question of investments of property in so glaring a wrong is not to be considered for a moment. The process has been permitted to go too far already, and the sooner it is stopped the more will be saved to the community. It has caused much harm, and is daily continuing its injurious work. In the New York Fishery reports reference has been made to many localities where the fishing, once excellent, was ruined by this process. The list can be extended every year.

Fallacious views have existed as to the migratory habits of fish. It has been supposed that they were accustomed to make long journeys, that they traveled up and down rivers, moved from shore to shore of broad lakes, and even crossed the ocean. The motions of anadromous fish had probably furnished ground for this opinion, but even as to them the impression is essentially incorrect. Shad appear first in the spring in the rivers of our southern states; as the season advances they begin to be taken in more northerly waters till in June and July they visit the streams of New England and then close their career.

Nothing was more natural than to suppose that these fish traversed the entire sea coast, coming in, perhaps, from the depths of the ocean or the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico where they had been feeding during the winter, and gradually advancing northward as the hot days progressed, sending off a cohort into each river which was adapted to their propagation. Subsequent experiments have tended strongly to negative this theory as we have already explained and it is now believed among those best informed that fish move their quarters rarely and to only a limited extent; and that even migratory varieties remain not far from the mouths of the rivers which they ascend for the purposes of procreation.

The slow succession of changing varieties along our own coast confirm this later view of their habits. It is within the memory of man that the common blue-fish, temnodon saltator, arrived among us. It did not come all at once, but augmented slowly, displacing a coarser and larger variety of the mackerel family. But it had come to stay, and the advanced guard was soon joined by others.