Connecticut is making the experiment of giving to individuals personal title to submerged land, to be used in oyster culture, and this, perhaps, is the wisest step taken. Oyster production must soon cease to be a free grabbing enterprise, and be placed upon the same footing as agriculture, or the United States will lose its beloved oyster crop, and in this country, as in England, a fresh oyster will be worth as much as a new-laid egg. Great Britain has, at present, two schools of fishery economists, the one headed by Professor Huxley, opposed to legislation, save for the preservation of fish in inland waters, the other, of which Dr. Francis Day is the chief leader, advocating a most strenuous legal regulation of the sea fisheries. Continental Europe is by tradition and belief committed to the last named policy. In the United States, on the contrary, public opinion is generally antagonistic to fishery legislation, and our Commissioner of Fisheries, after carrying on for fourteen years investigations upon this very question, has not yet become satisfied that laws are necessary for the perpetuation of the sea fisheries, nor has he ever recommended to Congress enactment of any description. Just here we meet the test problem in fish culture. Many of the most important commercial fisheries of the world, the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the sardine fishery, the shad and alewife fishery, the mullet fishery, the salmon fishery, the whitefish fishery, the smelt fishery, and many others, owe their existence to the fact that once a year these fishes gather together in closely swimming schools, to spawn in shallow water, on shoals, or in estuaries and rivers. There is a large school of _quasi_ economists, who clamor for the complete prohibition of fishing during spawning time. This demand demonstrates their ignorance. Deer, game birds, and other land animals may easily be protected in the breeding season, so may trout and other fishes of strictly local habits. Not so the anadromous and pelagic fishes. If they are not caught in the spawning season, they can not be caught at all. I heard a prominent fish culturist recently advocating before a committee of the United States Senate, the view that shad should not be caught in the rivers, because they came into the rivers to spawn. When asked what would become of our immense shad fisheries if this were done, he said that doubtless some ingenious person would invent a means of catching them at sea. The fallacy in the argument of these men lies in the supposition that it is more destructive to the progeny of a given fish to kill it when its eggs are nearly ripe, than to kill the same fish eight or ten months earlier.