Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/137

Rh PISCICULTURE 127 people living on the banks. It has been shown that a river which is too foul for fish to live in is not fit to flow near the habitations of man. Obstructions, such as dams, may, in most instances, be overcome by fish ladders. The salmon has profited much by those devices in Europe, and the immense dams in American rivers will doubtless be passable even for shad and alewives if the new system of fishway construction devised by Col. M Donald, and now being applied on the Savannah, James, and Potomac, and other large rivers, fulfils its present promises of success. 1 The protection of fish by law is what legislators have been trying to effect for many centuries, and the success of their efforts must be admitted to have been very slight indeed. Great Britain has at present two schools of fishery- economists, the one headed by Prof. 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 strenuous legal regulation of sea fisheries also. Continental Europe is by tradition and belief committed to the last-named policy. In the United States, on the contrary, public opinion is generally anta gonistic to fishery legislation ; and Prof. Baird, the com missioner of fisheries, after carrying on for fourteen years, with the aid of a large staff of scientific specialists, inves tigations 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 the enactment of any kind of fishery laws 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 white fish 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 estua ries and rivers. There is a large school of quasi econo mists who clamour for the complete prohibition of fishing during spawning time. Their demand demonstrates their ignorance. Deer, game, birds, and other land animals may easily be protected in the breeding season, and 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 cannot be caught at all. The writer recently heard a prominent fish-culturist advocating before a committee of the United States Senate the view 7 that shad should not be caught in the rivers because they come into the rivers to spawn. When asked what would become of the immense shad-fisheries if this were done, he ventured the remark that doubtless some ingenious person would invent a means of catching them at sea. The fallacy in the argument of these economists lies, in part, in supposing 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. We must not, however, ignore the counter-argu ment. Such is the mortality among fish that only an infinitesimal percentage attains to maturity. Professor Mbbius has shown that for every grown qySter upon the beds of Schleswig-Holstein 1,045,000 have died. Only a very small percentage, perhaps not greater than this, of the shad or the smelt ever comes upon the breeding grounds. Some consideration, then, ought to be shown to those individuals which have escaped from their enemies and have come up to deposit the precious burden of eggs. How much must they be protected 1 Here the fish-cul turist comes in with the proposition that &quot; it is cheaper to 1 Report of United States Fish Commission for 1883. make fish so plentiful by artificial means that every fisher man may take all he can catch than to enforce a code of protection laws.&quot; The salmon rivers of the Pacific slope of the United States, the shad rivers of the east, and the vvhitefish fisheries of the lakes are now so thoroughly under control by the fish-culturist that it is doubtful if any one will venture to contradict his assertion. The question is whether he can extend his domain to other species. Fish-culture in a restricted sense must sooner or later be resorted to in all densely populated countries, for, with the utmost protection, nature unaided can do but little to meet the natural demand for fish to eat. Pond-culture (Tdc/nvirtkschaft), has been practised for many centuries, and the carp and the gold-fish have become domesticated like poultry and cattle. The culture of carp is an import ant industry in China and in Germany, though perhaps not more so than it was in England three and four centuries ago; the remains of ancient fish-stews may be seen upon almost every large estate in England, and particularly in the vicinity of old monasteries. Strangely enough, not a single well-conducted carp-pond exists in England to-day to perpetuate the memory of the tens of thousands which were formerly sustained, and the carp, escaping from cultivation, have reverted to a feral state and are of little value. Until improved varieties of carp are introduced from Germany, carp-culture can never be made to succeed in England. Carp-culture is rapidly coming into favour in the United States ; a number of young scale carp and leather carp were imported in 1877 for breeding purposes, and the fish commission has since distributed them to at least 30,000 ponds. Two railway cars especi ally built for the purpose are employed during the autumn months delivering cargoes of carp, often making journeys of over three thousand miles, and special ship ments have been made to Mexico and Brazil. The carp is not recommended as a substitute for the salmon, but is especially suited to regions remote from the sea where better-flavoured fish cannot be had in a fresh condition. A kind of pond-culture appears to have been practised by the ancient Egyptians, though in that country as in ancient Greece and Rome, the practice seems to have been similar to that now employed in the lagoons of the Adriatic and of Greece, and to have consisted in driving the young- fish of the sea into artificial enclosures or vivaria, when they were kept until they were large enough to be used. The discovery of the art of artificially fecundating the ova of fish must apparently be accredited to Stephen Ludwig Jacobi of Hohenhausen in Westphalia, who, as early as 1748, carried on successful experiments in breed ing salmon and trout. The importance of this discovery was thoroughly appreciated at the time, and from 1763 to 1800 was a fruitful subject of discussion in England, France, and Germany. George III. of England in 1771 granted to Jacobi a life pension. It has been claimed by many French writers that the process of artificial fecunda tion was discovered as early as 1420 by Dom Pinchon, a monk in the abbey of Reome, but this claim is but a feeble one, not having been advanced until 1854, and it is believed by many that the practice of the French monk was simply to collect and transplant the eggs which he had already found naturally fertilized. However interest ing to the antiquarian, the proceedings of Dom Pinchon had no influence upon the progress of fish-culture. To Germany, beyond question, belongs the honour of discover ing and carrying into practical usefulness the art of fish- culture. Upon the estate of Jacobi, by the discoverer and his sons, it was carried on as a branch of agriculture for fully eighty years from 1741 to 1825 though it was nearly a hundred years before public opinion was