Now consider how easy it is, taking these fish so much at a disadvantage, to diminish their numbers, simply by catching them. The man who catches a spawning cod destroys anywhere from 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 of eggs, a spawning halibut at least 2,000,000, a shad from 50,000 to 2,000,000. Is not the American breakfasting on broiled shad roe a modern representative of him who killed the goose which laid the golden egg? When we consider that the yearly catch of mother-fish along the New England coast does not fall short of ten to fifteen millions of individuals, we may gain an adequate idea of the destruction of fish life by the fisheries. Still it is not necessary to be alarmed at these figures. They are presented simply in illustration of the immense possibilities of destruction when the fisheries are carried on at the spawning season. As a matter of fact, cod are just as abundant along our coasts as they ever were, and it has not yet been demonstrated that any kind of sea fish has ever been diminished in numbers by hook and line fishing or by netting them at a distance from the shore. Some kinds of fishes, however, enter narrow bays and estuaries to spawn, and if they are there recklessly destroyed, the local supply at least may be permanently interfered with. This has apparently been the case with certain species in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. For instance, the scuppaug or porgy has been seriously diminished in numbers in certain seasons, years ago; the supply will probably be replenished from adjoining waters by the reparative tendencies of nature, if this indeed has not already been done. So, too, the halibut has been exterminated in Massachusetts, where it was once so abundant as to be regarded as a nuisance by the fishermen. It is in the inland or freshwater fisheries, however, that the work of extermination has been thorough, and here, from the nature of the case, the work once accomplished, it is beyond the power of nature to remedy the damage. If I could take the reader with me next May to one of the many little streamlets of Cape Cod, flowing southward into Nantucket Sound, I could show him a scene which he would never forget. The little rill has been encased at bottom and sides with planks, so that it flows for a mile or two, down to its junction with the sea, in a straight trough not over fifteen inches wide, and a foot in depth. At a convenient level place a shed has been built over the trough, and in the floor is a kind of cistern, through which the waters of the brook flow as it goes on its course. In the shed stand two men, each with a great scoop of netting, with which they labor, dipping the fish out of the cistern as they fill it, swimming up the trough from the sea. Several barrels are taken out every day, and in some of these streams one or two thousand barrels always reward a season’s work, the brook being the property of the township, and the privilege of fishing being sold at auction for the benefit of the public.