Comacchio lagoon owed its inception to men conversant 

 with Roman methods of fish-farming. 



Down to within a hundred years of our own time, 

 the Comacchio and other Italian establishments on the 

 Adriatic had no imitators and to-day marine fish-farming 

 worthy of the name is limited to Italy and France. In 

 view of the great attention devoted to the culture of 

 fresh-water fishes during the past 60 years and the 

 wonderfully good commercial results obtained therefrom 

 especially in the United States of America and in Ger- 

 many, this neglect of the pond culture of sea fish may 

 appear strange. Two principal reasons may be given — 

 the higher capital expenditure usually necessary to con- 

 struct and organize marine fish-farms owing to the larger 

 scale on which they have to be conceived and the general 

 ignorance of the lines on which such ponds must be 

 constructed and regulated. We have innumerable works 

 in English upon fish-culture, but the authors with sin- 

 gular unanimity limit their descriptions and instructions 

 to fresh water work ; indeed the majority of pisciculturists 

 appear to be unaware of the fact that sea-fish culture in 

 ponds is practised with profit in France and Italy. 



The most suitable coastal districts for marine fish- 

 culture are those where there is a wide margin of shore 

 lands scarcely if at all raised beyond the level of high-tide. 

 Such lands have been formed in the main as deltaic de- 

 posits at and around the mouths of rivers. Others again 

 arise from the drifting of sand and other debris of the 

 land along a coast by the force of locally prevailing winds 

 and currents and their accumulation as fiats and dunes in 

 angles of the coast line. Prevailing winds and currents 

 may also form long sand spits parallel with the coast at 

 the mouths of rivers and, by deflecting the river estuary 

 in the same direction, create estuarine sheets of water 

 often of very great area ; these are known as backwaters 

 in India, and as lagoons in Italy. 



Deltaic marshes and shallow backwaters provide the 

 best conditions for sea-fish culture on commercial lines 

 and both are numerous on Indian coasts. The Madras 

 coast line is specially favoured ; along the western coast 

 stretches a long chain of backwaters frequently connected 

 and giving ff innumerable branches and side creeks ; 

 the eastern coast also oossesses a number of important 



