484 EEPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND- FISHERIES. 



not whether it is organized in a way to fulfill a part of the promises 

 which its foLiuders have often put forward 5 but from the iuformation 

 w^hich has reached ns from several quarters, it wonld seem that their 

 success has not always been as complete as was hoped for at first. It 

 is then nuich to be feared that after four years, and even more, the 

 establishment of Huuiugue will not have succeeded in alone restocking 

 with fish all the waters of France, and in making them produce the nine 

 hundred millions of francs promised b}^ MM. Berthol and Detzem. 



However this may be, the relations established between this piscifac- 

 tory and the College of France have furnished to M. Coste an opportu- 

 nity of making some curious observations on the transport of the eggs, 

 and the duration of their vitality after having been taken from the 

 water. Some eggs of salmon and trout, sent from Mulhansen by the 

 diligence, were hatched in great numbers at the College of France. The 

 precaution had simply been taken of surrounding them with moist aqua- 

 tic herbs in a tin box pierced with holes on the u[)per side.* Other eggs, 

 artificially fecundated, arranged in layers with wet sand in a pine box, 

 remained thus two months in a cold chamber. At the end of this time 

 they were only corrugated; but having placed the box in water to 

 moisten them through the sand, M. Coste savr them soon resume their 

 natural appearance, and they hatched soon after. 



To render possible in his labratory the experiments which he had 

 undertaken, ]\I. Coste had to adopt an apparatus occupying but little 

 space, and for which a simple thread of water would sufiice. The 

 arrangements which he chose are very simple. This apparatus, which, 

 by the way, we have often seen in operation, is an assemblage of little 

 trou"'hs arranged like steps on each side of an upper trough which serves 

 to supply all the others. The botto;n of each trough is covered with a 

 bed of gravel. A stop-cock lets fall a continuous thread of water into 

 one end of the upper trough. A current is thus created toward the 

 other end, and there an opening at the sides giving it passage to right 

 and left, it breaks into two falls. of water which go to feed the two troughs 

 l^laced immediately below. These last have also openings by which the 

 water falls into the lower troughs, the number of which may be increased 

 at pleasure. 



After the hatching obtained by this apparatus, M. Coste was able to 

 inclose two thousand young salmon into a canal of baked earth, having 

 fifty-five centimeters in length, (twenty-one inches,) fifteen in breadth, 

 and eight in depth, Avhere, says he, the current is kept up by a simple 

 thread of water of the size of a straw. He gave them for nourishment 

 a paste formed of muscular flesh reduced to fine fibers, in preference to 

 the boiled blood of which Re my and Gehin had made use. A salmon 

 raised in this manner in an artificial pond two meters in length, (eighty 

 inches,) and fifty centimeters in breadth, (nineteen and one-half inches,) 

 was, at the age of six months, larger than those of the same age taken 

 * Couiptes-rendus of the Academy of Sciences, vol. xxxiii, p. 124, 185-3. 



