hus 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.

Some of the most important work is interestingly described in a history
of the Bureau of Fisheries issued in 1908. Among other things it tells
of the lobster industry in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Lobsters are not found naturally in the Pacific, but shipments of
lobsters have been made from the Atlantic coast. At the last shipment,
after carrying them across the continent packed in seaweed, more than a
thousand lobsters were safely placed on the bed of the Pacific Ocean.

On the Atlantic coast the lobsters were rapidly disappearing when the
work of artificial "planting" of young lobsters and eggs began. The
results can be seen now, for more lobsters are being caught each year,
and the price to users is growing less as the supply becomes more
plentiful.

The shad and the salmon are considered the finest of all fish for
eating. Both are salt-water fish and both have the habit of going some
distance up fresh-water rivers to lay their eggs. No eggs are ever laid
in salt water. The mother fish goes up beyond where the tide comes in,
so that the baby fish may have fresh water, which is necessary for them.
Salmon and shad are never caught in the sea, but in the rivers, where
they go in large numbers to lay their eggs in the spring. This, of
course, means the destruction of both fish and eggs,--the present and
future supply.

Shad eggs, or roe are sold in large quantities. The Bureau of Fisheries
has planted three thousand millions of young shad in streams along the
coast, and the eggs from which these fish were hatched were all ta