DE. HOOD — PISCICULTURE IN nERTFORDSHIEE. 185 



I will now conclude in the words of Bocciiis, who studied this 

 subject fifty years ago: — "All the fresh waters of these United 

 Kingdoms, it is not too much to say, are grossly neglected, and 

 the rivers especially are imperfectly understood."'* In this age of 

 knowledge it is greatly to be regretted that water should not be 

 cultivated as much as land, and more especially when it is a matter 

 of fact that water is far more capable of producing abundance of 

 food than any element in the great laboratory of nature. Why 

 then should such a source of plenty be neglected ? 



Appendix. 



Notes on Pisciculture in Hertfordshire. 

 By Peter Hood, M.D. 



Mr. Boccius was the first person who, thirty -five years ago, wrote 

 a treatise on Pisciculture. f To the Chinese, however, belongs 

 the credit of having first of all practised the artificial hatching of 

 fish. They placed the ovum of a fish in an egg-shell half-full of 

 Avatcr, and watched the progress of hatching with as much interest 

 as we would the growth of a rare plant. The spawn of the fish 

 they watched were those belonging to the Cypridee, or carp tribe, 

 fish that inhabit still waters. If they had tried the same experi- 

 ment on trout ova — had they possessed any — they would have 

 failed to accomplish their design, as the spawn of the Salmonidge, 

 like the fish themselves, require running water to hatch them, as 

 those fish do to exist in. 



Twenty years ago I engaged the services of Mr. Eamsbotham, of 

 Clitheroe, who had taken up the practice of Pisciculture. He 

 operated on a large quantity of ova taken from trout belonging 

 to the River Colne, at Rickmansworth, but the result was not 

 attended with success, owing to the fact not being then recognised, 

 that for the perfect hatching of trout ova, clear water was an 

 indispensable requisite. If I had paid attention to the dictum 

 of Lord Ebury's ancient keeper, Green, that "the Colne was 

 a bad breeding river, but an excellent feeding one," I might have 

 taken it as a warning of non-success, for, when the ova failed to 

 hatch, the reason was patent enough, — they were all covered with 

 alluvial deposit, which abounds in this river in the winter-time, 

 and the ova were, so to speak, suffocated. 



The next experiment I tried was on the river Chess, whose 

 water runs clear winter and summer — at least it did so then, 

 before it was polluted by the existing paper mill. The late Mr. 

 Marston, who then rented Rickmansworth Park, kindly gave me 

 permission. I tapped the bank of the river with a 2in. pipe, the 



* Fish in Eivers and Streams, p. 36. 



t Gottlieb Boccins was the author of two works on Pisciculture, the first of 

 which, entitled ' A Treatise on the Management of Fresh-water Fish,' was 

 published in 1841, and gave the result of many years' observations; the second, 

 ' A Treatise on the Management of Fish in Rivers and Streams,' was published 

 in 1848.— Ed. 



