xcviii Introduction.

1766, session, as it had at the preceding 1765 Assembly. Two bills affecting
fish conservation had been introduced at the 1765 session. One of these, under
the title "An Act to prevent the Navigation of the Potomac River, Monockasy,
and great Conecocheague Creeks being obstructed", which had its origin in the
Lower House and sought to prevent the erection of dams and fish weirs, was
obviously a fish conservation measure; it was rejected in the Upper House
because it was deemed a threat to private interests in the case of a certain dam
already in operation. The other bill, with a more revealing title was, "An Act
for the preservation of the breed of fish", also came before the 1765 session, but
action upon it was referred to the next Assembly. These two bills and an
Upper House bill before the 1765 Assembly to repeal the existing law in regard
to the building of water mills, which was rejected for undisclosed reasons in
the Lower House and was also a fish conservation measure, have been fully
discussed in a previous volume of the Archives as the first serious attempts to
protect fish made in Maryland (Arch. Md. LIX, xxxiii-xxxiv).

The bill "for the preservation of the breed of fish", doubtless identical with
the 1765 bill, came up again at the November-December, 1766, session. It
passed the Lower House and was sent to the upper chamber where numerous
amendments were added. The significance of several of these, in the absence
of a copy of the bill, is not obvious. One amendment, however, providing
that the fines collected, which under the Lower House bill were to be used to
"defray the public charge" of the several counties concerned, and which was
changed by the Upper House" to be used as the General Assembly shall direct",
was doubtless the principal cause of the unanimous rejection of the amended
bill by the lower chamber as the Lower House on general principles objected to
the upper chamber altering the money feature of any bill (pp. 144, 153, 196,
121, 124, 199). A similar impasse between the two houses as regards the
disposition of fines had caused the rejection in the Lower House at this session
of the bills licensing ordinaries or inns, and hawkers and peddlers, the house
denying the right of the upper chamber to amend a money bill (p. ciii). Thus
the bill for the preservation of the breed of fish died at this session, to be
passed, however, in 1768, along the general lines of the 1766 Lower House bill.

At the November-December, 1766, session, an act passed without a hint
in the title as to its principal purpose, may be considered the first fish conserva-
tion law to have been passed in Maryland. This was an act repealing the greater
part of a former law passed in 1704 "for the encouragement of the erection
of water mills", under which the builder of such mills enjoyed sundry privileges,
one of which was to erect dams without making provision for fish ways. Under
the repealed sections the right to build dams on rivers was abolished. This law
is discussed elsewhere in this Introduction (p. xxxv). As will be seen from
what follows, it was unquestionably primarily a fish conservation measure.

It was at the 1768 session that the two important laws for fish conservation
which had been before previous Assemblies were passed, apparently without
opposition. These were: (I) "an act for the preservation of the breed of
Fish in the Susquehannah and Patuxent rivers", and (2) "an act to prevent
any obstruction of the navigation of the River Potomack." The preamble to
the first of these acts for the preservation of fish in the Susquehanna and Pa-