1864.] ON PISCICULTURE. 125 



of a science, which is every year attracting more attention. I shall 

 not weary you by entering into the history of the art : suffice it to 

 say, that the first discoverers were two poor French fishermen, 

 Gehin and Rerai. All honor to their namosfor the great good they 

 have done to their fellow-creatures. 



You will find in books a statement repeated over and over again, 

 — a fault very common in treatises on natural history, — that the 

 Chinese were the first to practice pisciculture. But let me tell 

 you what their pisciculture consists of. They have no idea (I 

 have it from the best authority, viz. of officers in the army who 

 have travelled there) of hatching fish in troughs, such as we see in 

 European establishments, nor have they yet arrived at the practice 

 of impregnating the eggs artificially. What they do is this : They 

 observe the spawn of fish hanging about the bushes, having been 

 placed there by the fish themselves. They collect this spawn, hang 

 it up in tubs and ponds, and let it hatch out of itself. But though 

 they have not the science that we have, yet they are pisciculturists 

 in a most practical manner ; for I have it on the authority of an 

 eye-witness, that when the Chinese flood their paddy or rice fields 

 with water, they turn out into those flooded fields large numbers 

 of fish, which feed upon the worms, insects, &c., which they find 

 in the mud, and this without injury but rather benefit to the plants 

 themselves. When the fields have had enough water, the Chinese 

 water-farmer opens the hatchways, catches what fish are fat enough 

 and sends them to market ; the others he lets out into another 

 fresh-flooded paddy-field for a pasture. In fact, the Chinese herd 

 their fish, and drive them from one pasture to another, just as a 

 shepherd drives his sheep from one field to another. These fish 

 are, it is said, great coarse things, and appear to be something 

 between a chub and a tench. There are, I believe, no representa- 

 tives of the Salmonidae in China. 



Leaving the history of the subject at this point, I would now 

 proceed to the practice of the art. There may be some who say, 

 VV^hy not let the fish breed for themselves ? Doubtless, if left alone 

 in a perfect natural state, they would multiply themselves to an 

 enormous extent, as is the cise, I am told, at Petropaulowski, 

 where the salmon are occasionally left high and dry by the subsid- 

 ing of the floods, and such numbers of them perish in this way as 

 to cause a plague by the putrefaction of their bodies. 



When we consider the vast number of eggs which nature 



