ARTIFICIAL HA TCHING OF MARINE FOOD-FISHES. 253 



certain marine fishes had been hatched for scientific obser- 

 vations, yet to the Americans, under the late Professor 

 Spencer Baird, belongs the credit of having first bestirred 

 themselves in regard to the artificial hatching' of marine 

 food-fishes on a large scale. Since the establishment of 

 the Fish Commission in 1871, various places on the coast 

 have been selected for marine work of this kind, and finally 

 the stations of Wood's Holl and Gloucester, on the shores 

 of Massachusetts, were fixed on for permanent occupation 

 and the erection of hatcheries, with, in the case of the 

 former, a well-equipped laboratory. The Americans, in- 

 deed, with a breadth of view not always met with in our 

 country, have ever held that it is not merely by the 

 mechanical addition of fishes to our waters that the marine 

 fisheries generally will be advanced. In other words, that 

 it is on scientific investigation into marine life in general 

 — whether directly or indirectly bearing on fishes and the 

 fisheries, in addition to what may be termed fish-cultural 

 work — that real progress depends. As Lord Playfair 

 clearly put it in 1884 : " Though the promise of practical 

 utility from such (marine) laboratories is very great, that is 

 not the first or the only thing to be considered. Labora- 

 tories of this nature, in which the habits of all kinds of 

 marine life should be studied, ought primarily to be estab- 

 lished, not with a view to practical uses, but with the main 

 purpose of advancing science for its own sake. Science so 

 studied rewards a nation a thousand-fold in the most un- 

 expected practical applications ; but without science there 

 are no applications." 1 



As might have been expected, the hatching apparatus 

 for the eggs Q f marine fishes was at first somewhat imper- 

 fect, and various methods — such as floating-boxes, plunging- 

 buckets, Chester tidal-jars, and the universal hatching-jar — 

 have since been adopted with more or less success. From 

 the fact that most of the food-fishes have floating or pelagic 

 eggs, which often rise near the surface of the water, quite 

 a different arrangement is necessary from that, for instance, 



1 Report of Meeting for Biological Investigation of Coasts of United 

 Kingdom, 31st March, 1884, P- IO - 



