ATKINS THE SALMON AND ITS ARTIFICIAL CULTURE. 251 



The presence of a great quantity of milt in the water also obstructs the 

 process, and therefore the eggs are generally rinsed once or twice. As 

 soon as the eggs are completely expanded, and have loosed their hold 

 on the pan, they are poured into a pail and carried down to the hatch- 

 ing-honse. In a full saimou the eggs are packed so far forward behind 

 the gills that at the first pressure it is impossible to get them all at 

 once. The fish were, therefore, after spawning, placed in one of the 

 pens and left a day or two, or till a convenient time, when they were 

 taken out and stripped again, this time yielding from two hundred to 

 five hnndred eggs each. With this second jield of eggs the success iu 

 fecnndation was not so good as with the first taken, which I attribute 

 to the presence of an excess of water in the abdomen. 



The work proceeded rapidly until the 2d day of November, when 

 nearly a million of eggs had been taken. The fish then came more 

 slowly for a week. On the 7th and 8th of November fell 2.7 inches of 

 rain. The pond rose rapidly, and jjonred into the brook a fiood that 

 overliowed our pens, letting oat our salmon, and mingling them with a 

 large number of new-comers. In the hatching-house it rose over the 

 floor and over the troughs, where the eggs were deposited. To keep 

 the floor iu place, a few shores had been set against the beams above, 

 but the buoyancy of the floor, or of the air confined under it, broke the 

 shores, allowing parts of the floor to rise several inches, and some of 

 the hatching-troughs swung out of place. In a day or two the water sub- 

 sided, and was found to have done no harm in the house except that it 

 left a heavy deposit of sediment in the hatching-troughs and ou the eggS- 



The new rise of the water had brought down a fine lot of salmon, a 

 large part of them ripe and full. Most of those that had escaped from 

 the pens were caught again and kept for marking. 



It was at this time that the salmon passed our barriers on the tribu- 

 tary brooks, traversed a mile of meadow beyond them, and gained 

 a rapid, gravelly brook,* when they at once set about the work 

 of spawning. Here they were found on the 10th in a little brook that a 

 child could step across, above rapids where it seemed almost impossible 

 that a salmon could ascend. Quite a number were found dead, and I 

 doubt not that they killed themselves by striking against the rocks in 

 the attempt to climb a difiBcult fall, which the most of them passed. 

 About seventy fish were caught there, the majority of them females. 

 Many had already spawned, and only about a hundred thousand eggs 

 were obtained from them. 



Scattering salmon continued to run into the brook until the 21st 

 of November, when the last eggs were taken. Including those caught 

 atEich's Brook there were taken about 225 females and 130 males. A 

 more exact statement cannot be made on account of the confusion oc- 

 casioned by the freshet of November 9. 



*Eich's Brook ; see map of Spofford's Brook. 



