When they are taken from the waters the 2,169,000,000 pounds of fish caught in the United States are worth $58,000,000, but by canning, salting, and other processes of preserving, the value is greatly increased. Fortunately, there is a method of conserving our supply of fish and not only preventing it from growing less, but of greatly increasing the number and improving the quality. The United States government has a thoroughly well organized fish commission, and many states and counties and even private clubs carry on the same work, which is a general supervision of the fish supply. The government maintains stations which are regularly engaged in hatching fish, keeping them until the greatest danger of their being destroyed is past, and then placing them in various streams all over the country. These fish are always of good food varieties, and are carefully selected to insure the kind best suited to the stream, as to whether it is warm or cold, deep or shallow, clear or muddy, fresh or salt, slow and placid, or swift and turbulent, for each kind of stream has certain varieties of fish that are especially adapted to it. With all these things taken into account, stocking only with the best food varieties, if a state has laws which require that a stream be kept free from sewage and refuse, that no tiny fish be taken from the water, and that only a stated number can be taken in a day by a single person, hundreds of small streams, ponds and reservoirs all over the country may be made to yield food supplies for the entire community near by. Governor Deneen, of Illinois, in urging that streams be improved for navigation, says, "No estimate of the benefits to flow from stream development would be complete without allusion to the fisheries which have been established on the Illinois River, largely by restocking with fish from hatcheries. The fisheries located on that stream are second in value only to those of the Columbia River. "Our experience thus far indicates that the food resources of the water may be brought up in value to those of the land. The Illinois valley contains 80,000 acres of water area and yields a fish product worth ten dollars an acre each year, very nearly all profit. The average value of the land product near by is a little less than twelve dollars an acre, and the labor, cost of seeding, and exhaustion of fertilization of the land must all be counted before there can be a profit." In 1908 the United States Fish Commission distributed nearly two and a half billion of young fish and half a million fish eggs. These were such excellent varieties as salmon, shad, trout, bass, white fish, perch, cod, flat fish and lobsters. The Bureau of Fisheries has its fish-hatching stations, its boats for catching fish in nets and its tank cars for carrying the young fish and eggs to the streams that are to be stocked.