470 EEPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



there, and the young, which are soon hatched, are a source of consider- 

 able profit to the riparian proprietors. The Jesuit father John Baptiste 

 Duhahle, is the first French author who has shown* the manner in which 

 this traffic is effected. We give his account, which most historians have 

 copied with alterations: "In the great river \ang-tse-kiang, not far 

 from the city Kieon-king fou, in the province of Kiang-si, at certain 

 times of the year, are assembled a prodigious number of boats for the 

 purchase there of the eggs of fish. Toward the month of May, the 

 country-people bar the river in various places with mats and hurdles 

 for a length of about nine or ten leagues, leaving- only sufficient space 

 for the passage of the boats ; the eggs of the fish are stopped by these 

 hurdles. They can distinguish them by the eye, where other persons 

 see nothing in the water ; they draw out this water mixed with eggs, 

 and fill several vases with it for sale, which causes, at this season, num- 

 bers of merchants to come with their boats to buy it, and transport it 

 into different provinces, taking care to agitate it from time to time. 

 They succeed one another in this operation. The water is sold in meas- 

 ures to all those who have fish-preserves and domestic ponds. After 

 some days there are seen in the impregnated water, as it were, little 

 heaps of fishes' eggs, without its being yet possible to distinguish the 

 species. It is only with time that this appears. The profit is often a 

 hundred fold more than the outlay, as the people live in great part 

 upon fish." To these very simple but successful means of replenishing 

 their ponds, the Chinese are said to have joined others which travelers 

 have only very imperfectly indicated ; they assert that when the young- 

 fish begins to eat, they give him marsh lentils mixed with yellow of 



The Romans had nearly similar customs at a very early epoch. "The 

 descendants of Romulus and Remus," says Columella,! "rustics as they 

 were, had much at heart the procuring upon their farms a sort of abun- 

 dance in every thing like that which reigns among the inhabitants of 

 the city ; thus they were not satisfied with stocking with fish the ponds 

 which they had constru(;ted for this purpose, but carried their foresight 

 to the point of filling lakes formed by nature with the spawn of fish 

 which they threw into them. In this way the lakes Velinus and Saba- 

 tinus, as well as the Vulsmensis and Oiminus, have, in the end, abun- 

 dantly furnished, not only cat-fish and gold-fish, but, moreover, all other 

 sorts of fish which are able to live in fresh water." These practices were 

 early abandoned, and it is a matter of surprise, when we consider the 

 strange infatuation of which fish became the object in ancient Italy 

 during the following centuries, that no measures were then taken to 

 insure their reproduction and free development. It is well known that 

 the ancients had a remarkable predilection for this species of food. The 

 principal luxury of the Roman banquets consisted of fish, and the poets 



*Hi8tory of the Cbiuese Empire, vol. 1, p. 35, 1735 

 t De Re Rustica, book viii, section 16. 



