REPORT OF COMMISSIONERS OF INLAND FISHERIES. 25 
are usually but a quarter of an inch long, this box was examined, 
and from one square foot of the sand in the bottom thirteen hun- 
dred clams were taken. They were, of course, of small size, and 
the thirteen hundred measured in bulk three-quarters of a pint. 
These clams were carefully transplanted and, although many have 
been preserved as specimens for future reference and others were 
destroyed or lost in the handling, on August 22d of the following 
year we still had five hundred and thirty-two specimens from this 
lot. At this time they measured fourteen quarts. The average 
length of these was slightly over two inches—this average being 
computed from careful measurements of about seventy-five speci- 
mens taken at random.* It should be said that in the immediate 
vicinity of this clam-catcher there were almost no small clams to 
be found, so that undoubtedly the extraordinary find within the 
box demonstrated the feasibility of this method of obtaining the 
spat. 
During the summer of 1900 several similar spat-catching appar- 
atus were put down in various localities. Some of these were 
successful, but many of them failed to yield the expected number 
of young clams. There is very good reason to believe that the 
failure of these was due to neglect in one particular feature, 
namely, in having the sides of the box set well into the sand, for 
it was noticed that whereyer the apparatus failed to catch the 
spat, the water had been allowed to run out of the box under the 
edge, and so to carry out the spat which had been precipitated 
through the screen top. In one of these apparatus, which for the 
most part was unsuccessful from this cause, a finger-bowl with a 
little sand in the bottom was placed, and in this finger-bowl over 
one hundred clams were caught, while around the finger-bowl in 
the rest of the box there were comparatively few. Besides this 
experiment, there were several boxes covered with screen and 
filled with sand, which were kept under water all the time at the 
house-boat, and the clams were precipitated in these boxes in 
* Since this was written these specimens have been again examined and the average length 
was slightly over 234 inches. These specimens are shown in figure 4. 
4 
