T'AO'S ISLANDS— HEN HATCHES FISH ! 463 



not only in China, but in the worlds Living in the early 

 fifth century B.C. he antedates the Roman Varro, our earUest 

 authority, by some three hundred years. He not only bred, 

 but wrote about fish. But to brother-breeder and brother- 

 writer of the present century Uke myself, the process as set 

 forth in his Yang Yii Ching {Treatise on Fish-breeding), is not 

 only difficult to follow in detail, but sadly lacking in result. 



As an example, take his method with the bastard carp, or 

 Carassius pekinensis. " In order to breed from the chi fish, 

 it is ripped up with a bamboo knife, and small quantities of 

 quicksilver, mixed with river sediment, and yu-ts'ai are intro- 

 duced into the belly. The fish is then stuffed with cabbage 

 leaves, and hung up for forty-nine days " (note here, the time is 

 pre-ordained, and alters not, as with us nowadays, with changes 

 in the temperature of the water flowing over the eggs) " in an 

 empty place, after which river water is used to extract one or 

 two eggs from the belly. These are placed in water, and covered 

 up with something, and after a while each egg turns into a 

 fish." 



Such ingenious industry, coupled with no small expenditure 

 on quicksilver, yu-ts'ai, and cabbage, deserved a far better 

 return. Had Fan Li intelligently anticipated a method in vogue 

 among his countrymen some two and a half millennia later, 

 money, labour, time, would all have been saved. But as Rome 

 was not built in a day, so centuries were necessary for the 

 evolution of a method of fish-hatching absolutely (to me) unique. 



" Not once or twice in its rough " world's story must the 

 ample, yet guileless, bosom of the domestic hen have swelled 

 with anticipatory pride, and subsequent resentful curiosity, 

 as the results of her " watchful waiting " emerged in guise of 

 ugly ducklings, swans, or cormorants. 



But of all the sittings to borrow her body's warmth, the 

 strangest and the most incongruous— after all, the duckhngs 

 were terrestrial, of a kith akin to her, and not aquatic and un- 

 registered ahens— was that composed of hundreds oifish eggs ! 



Lest this last sentence seem to label me as a descendant of 



1 Biog. Diet., 540. Li's fish-ponds are mentioned in the Wu Yiieh Ch'un 

 Ch'iu. or Annals of the States of Wu and Yneh. 



