BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 27 



stances, as in the example just cited, brought together the very best 

 couditions on a small scale, there is no reason why man should not 

 imitate them successfully, and in such a way as to make it exceedingly 

 protitable. While it is not possible in one year to settle upon all the 

 conditions necessary for success in the work of artificial oyster culture, 

 I believe that the business will in time be successfully pursued and will 

 engage the attention of an industrial and producing seaboard popula- 

 tion in the eastern United States which for numbers will surpass any- 

 thing of the kind the world has 3'et seen. In order to imitate nature 

 where she has been unusually successful in producing results profit- 

 able or advantageous to man, we must go to work to study her methods 

 by scientific means, and when we have discovered her combinations of 

 conditions favorable to her ends we shall have discovered those which 

 may be approximately imitated by man and applied by him to his own 

 puri)oses of gain. 



The successes of Brooks, McDonald, M. Brandely, and myself during 

 the past four years with the unisexual species of 03'Sters has proved that 

 we are nearing a solution of the question of their artificial culture — in 

 fact that we are translating the language of Nature into terms intelligi- 

 ble to man, and rendering her methods to some extent available indus- 

 trially. The first steps in this work are necessarily to some extent em- 

 pirical, but the results so far achieved have shown how utterly impos- 

 sible it would have been for the merely practical and avowedly un- 

 scientific man to have gained possession of all the information now in 

 our hands. 



The writer took up the subject in 1880, and then supposed that a box 

 constructed as shown in Fig. 6, in section, would answer to confine and 

 rear oyster spawn. The permeable bottom of the compartment b rested 

 upon a partition along its middle, which divided the space at the ends and 

 below h into the spaces a and c. The water was let into a, from which 

 it would filter up through the half of the bottom of h and down and out 

 again through the other half into c and off by the faucet o. While this 

 arrangement it was found would retain the fertilized eggs in the com- 

 partment h, the filter on the bottom, made of filtering paper, backed on 

 either side by strong canvas, was found would soon clog and stop the 

 passage of the water. Then it was attempted to force water through 

 an apparatus of the same kind; this too was a failure. A large flannel 

 l)en was then tried; this too failed. In 1881 a tidal box was constructed 

 similar in principle to what is shown in longitudinal plan and section in 

 Fig. 7. In this the spawn was confined in the chamber a, into which the 

 water was allowed to run slowly through the pipe i. The filter was hori- 

 zontal and formed thebottomof mostof the compartment &,into which the 

 "water would rise until it reached the level h I in both boxes, when it would 

 be run oft' rapidly through the wide siphon o till it reached the level 1 1, 

 when it would again fill to the level h I, to be again partially emptied. 

 This was also a failure as well as the Wolff's-bottles apparatus de- 



