INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 17 



this spawn must necessarily be mostly of species belonging 

 to the carp family, which abound in China. By this mode 

 of culture, fish are made so abundant and cheap there that 

 they are the chief food of the people. 



The Romans, vying with each other in the splendor of 

 their feasts, left no means unemployed of spreading their 

 tables with the best fish their climate afforded, and fish 

 culture was brought into requisition to a great extent to 

 supply this demand. M. Jourdier, a French writer on this 

 subject, says of Lucullus, " at his house at Tusculuni, on the 

 shores of the Grulf of Naples, he dug canals from his fish- 

 ponds to the sea. Into these canals freshwater streams 

 were led, and pure running water thus kept up. Sea-fish 

 that breed in fresh water passed through the canals into 

 his ponds, and stocked them with their young. When they 

 attempted to return to sea, flood-gates barred their 

 egress at the mouths of the canals, and while their progeny 

 were growing the parent fish supplied the market." The 

 value of the fish kept in these ponds, it is stated, amounted 

 to a sum which in our money would be equal to two hun- 

 dred and fifty thousand dollars. 



Fish culture appears to have fallen into disuse after the 

 fall of the Roman republic, as we find no mention of it 

 until the fourteenth century, when, according to M. Jourard, 

 Dom Pinchon, a monk of the Abbey of Reome, discovered 

 the art of breeding fish in wooden boxes, the ends being 

 of wicker work and the bottoms covered with sand, in which 

 excavations were made and the ova deposited. The art 

 was rediscovered about the year 1763 by Jacobi a German. 



