BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES PI8H COMMISSION.- 329 



II.*.- SHIPMENT OV WHITE FISH EGOS TO THE HAI.I.AKAT FI«II 



A((MMITI/VTI«\ SOCIETY. 



By W. P. \\ ill s < :oi?l BE, President. 



[From a letter to Prof. S. F. Baird.] 



Acting on your advice we placed the care of tbe consignment of white- 

 fish eggs in the hands of Mr. Creighton, of San Francisco, who evidently 

 did everything needful there, and the case was safely consigned by the 

 steamship City of Sydney to Sydney, where we had requested .Missis. 

 Gilchrist, Watt, & Co. to tranship to one of their large steamers plying 

 between that port and London, calling a) Melbourne. These gentlemen 

 carried out our wishes, and the consignment was brought on in the steam- 

 ship Liguria to Melbourne, arriving there on Monday, the 16th of Feb- 

 ruary, 1885. Messrs. Gilchrist , Watt, & Co. wrote us from Sydney tot he 

 effect that all the ova except those in the top tray were in good order. 

 With our secretary. Mr. Cooper, I proceeded to Melbourne on Monday 

 night, and arriving at the Liguria on Tuesday morning found that a 

 mistake had occurred. The ova had been placed in the refrigerating 

 chamber of the Liguria. and the captain having no ice (as these ships 

 make their own ice as required) and finding his refrigerating chamber 

 getting, as he thought, too cold, removed the box to the coolest place he 

 could fiud outside the refrigerater; but this was unfortunately much too 

 warm, and on bringing the box on deck we found that it had a most 

 unpleasant odor. We placed it at once in ice, and were able to com- 

 mence unpacking on Wednesday, the 17th, at Ballarat. We found all 

 ova in two top trays -gone; they had hatched and become putrid; as 

 were all in the centers of the other trays, but in the corners and at the 

 sides we found ova apparently good; and we carefully picked these out 

 iuto iced water, and placed them to the estimated number of 30,000 to 

 40,000 in water at a temperature of 40° in our hatching box.-. 

 By evening it became evident that the experiment was a failure, as 

 nearly all were hatched and dead, and by next morning all were gone. 

 Ou examination with a lens it seemed that, nearly all, except those we 

 picked out, had hatched in. the trays. 



Should you make a further attempt I will send a trustworthy man to 

 Sydney to take charge from there. A few hundredweights of ice would 

 have enabled us to bring the ova by rail and thus save a day at least. 

 Had thin slips of wood been placed between each tray so as to allow- 

 better ventilation, or at any rate to take oil any pressure caused by the 

 moss, it would have been better. The center of each tray was simply a 

 flattened, homogeneous, greasy paste, without any trace of ovum or fish 

 discernible; it was only at the edges and corners of the trays that there 

 could have been any visible ova even at Sydney. 



Ballarat, Australia, February 23, 1885. 



