224 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



acreage being 1 466,457 acres, while entire foreign States might 

 be almost swallowed up in several of our larger lakes. Our rivers 

 run a distance equal to one fifth of the circumference of the globe, 

 and are navigable thousands of miles above their mouths. But 

 more important than all this, is the character of our fish, for we 

 have the finest fish in the world for artificial cultivation, the most 

 prolific, the easiest managed, and the most remunerative. This is 

 a superiority more important than the other matters, and in this 

 Nature has been wonderfully kind to us. 



In order to explain this difference I shall have to describe with 

 some detail the method of manipulating the parents and raising 

 the young under artificial methods. Fish are exceedingly pro- 

 lific ; nature seems to have made them the great store-house of 

 food which was to be held in reserve until an increasing popula- 

 tion should require it for support. Every need of the human 

 kind seems to be met as it is developed, and the earth ap- 

 parently holds in its recesses the secrets which are to keep the 

 world thriving and progressing for ages, and until it shall be 

 covered with a swarming and happy population, denser than is 

 now imagined to be possible, or than learned essayists on a subject 

 they do not comprehend would permit as at all prudent. Fish 

 food is manifestly one of the means which are to make such a 

 result possible, and intellectual care is to develop this resource to 

 a degree as yet hardly dreamed of by the most enthusiastic. 



Different species offish, however, vary remarkably in the extent 

 of their fecundity. A cod and a herring each deposit a million 

 eggs, so that a dozen females of either, were all their eggs to hatch 

 and attain maturity, would furnish the entire yield of the present 

 time. Twelve million cod is an incredible number, and unless 

 nature had provided a means of reducing this fecundity the ocean 

 would long ago have been filled, till there would have been more 

 fish than water, and the sea would have been foul with their 

 decaying bodies. There is, however, no danger of any such state 

 of affairs; the difficulty at present lies in the other direction. 

 These are the most prolific species, but others do not come far 

 behind, shad producing from ten to twenty thousand eggs to 

 each pound of their weight, and consequently yielding from thirty 

 thousand to one hundred thousand eggs each. Salmon and trout 

 are less productive, having only about two thousand eggs to 

 each pound, and not even that in the largest. We have not yet 

 learned to breed cod or herring, but we can breed shad, and hence 



