418 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



spawning them rapidly would have yielded, say 6 female salmon, or 

 30,000 eggs, of which 28,000 would be impregnated. This, it will be 

 seen, is fourteen times the number gained in the same time by careful 

 impregnation, which shows that the time spent in getting eggs is better 

 rewarded than that consumed in laboring to obtain high percentages of 

 impregnation. 



To resume now the chronological order of events, I will repeat that 

 by the 19th of August we turned the water through the hatching-house, 

 and had the pleasure of seeing what I had long looked forward to, a 

 successful hatching-apparatus in perfect working-order in the salmon- 

 breeding regions of the Pacific slope. There seemed to be something in 

 the very sound of the rippling and plashing water to exhilarate our 

 spirits as it leaped through the troughs for the first time. I celebrated 

 the day by collecting our whole force of whites and Indians at sunset 

 and raising a large American flag over the camp. 



We continued to catch more salmon and to build more corrals for 

 them, and to extend the preparations for hatching the eggs. The female 

 salmon now began to show every sign of being nearly ready to spawn, and 

 we were daily expecting to find some ripe eggs. We remained, however, 

 in this not unpleasant state of excitement and anticipation until the 

 26th of August, when we took the first ripe salmon-eggs of the season, 

 numbering 23,000. 



Now came a new and unexpected drawback. The salmon, confined 

 in the corrals, had been literally wearing themselves out in their frantic 

 endeavors to ascend the river. Every moment, day and night, impelled 

 by their irrepressible instinct, they kept jumping and lashing themselves 

 against the sides of the inclosures, and now, comparatively exhausted 

 by their efforts and bruises, they were beginning to die from the effect 

 of them. Fortunately, there were enough more in the river to get eggs 

 from, for had we depended on our stock on hand when the first eggs 

 were taken we should have obtained a very meager supply. As it was, 

 I kept on fishing and replacing the dead salmon with live ones, so that 

 we had no lack of eggs, and obtained in the end the full two millions, 

 at which number I had set my limit. 



Nothing further occurred to interrupt our steady progress. We con- 

 tinued to take eggs every twenty-four hours, both night and day, and 

 the number in the troughs increased rapidly. 



On the 10th of September, at noon, we had a million eggs laid downjv 

 on the 14th of September, at daylight, we had a million and a half; and 

 on the 22d, at daylight, the quota of two millions was complete. On the 

 12th of September, the first eye-spots were visible in the eggs taken on the 

 26th of August, making sixteen days for the interval between the extru- 

 sion of the eggs and the appearance of the eye-spots, (the formation of 

 the choroid pigment.) The water in the river had a temperature of 53° 

 at sunrise when the first eggs were taken ; but it always rose in the hatch- 

 ing-troughs during the day, sometimes to 58°, and sometimes as high as 



