the progression of these laws you might watch, in town after town, the gradual growth of human population plus human concern for a valuable product. In 1709 a general law provides: “That no wears, hedges, fishgarths, stakes, kiddles, or other disturbance or encumbrance shall be set, erected or made, on or across any river, to the stopping, obstructing, or straitning of the natural or usual course and passage of the fish in their seasons, or spring of the year, without the approbation and allowance first had and obtained from the general sessions of the peace in the same county....” An Act of 1741, to “prevent the destruction of the fish called alewives, and other fish,” might indicate that the colonists were beginning to notice a decline in their numbers and to be apprehensive about it, although it is hard to judge. _A History of Barnstable County_, published in 1890, has this to say: “Early in the last century the supply of herring so far exceeded the demand for fish food that the surplus was used to fertilize the fields, and the growing custom of using them in each hill of planted corn was checked in 1718, the town fathers [of Bourne] ordering that none should be taken in the future to ‘fish corn.’” Apparently the alewife population did start to decrease a long time ago. Fishermen along the Merrimack River noticed a diminishing in numbers as early as the mid-eighteenth century; and somewhat later they thought it might be due to the number of small ponds which had been dammed up. These ponds had access to the river and so provided spawning grounds. Certainly the alewives, through man’s agency, began to suffer great setbacks in the old use of their runs. Some of the first culprits were the woolen mills, and corn or grist mills such as the one at Brewster--they blocked up many of the runs, in spite of the fish laws. Then a tremendous industrial expansion put cities and factories along all big rivers and many large streams, adding more mill dams across the runs. The resulting sewage and manufacturing wastes polluted the waters, destroying many fish, and making some rivers completely unfit for migration. Extensive deforestation also resulted in the drying up of a number of streams and the lowering of water levels. The nineteenth century was a notorious plunderer.