106 BRITISH FRESH-WATER FISHES 
years. The bottom is sown with rye grass, of which a heavy 
crop is cut and the consolidated mud is then dug away. 
Next, the ground is sown with mixed grasses, and as soon as 
these have formed a continuous turf, the pond is refilled and 
stocked with young carp, which feed upon the new pasture like 
a drove of cattle. When the grass is done, hand-feeding is 
resorted to. Even the art of castration, used from imme- 
morial times to hasten the fattening of domestic animals, is 
applied to carp, and it is said that those fish in which the 
ovaries have been destroyed are far better on the table than 
others. But when I read in a recent work of considerable 
merit * that Sir Hans Sloane demonstrated the process of 
castrating carp before George IV., I am reminded with what 
reserve all fishermen’s tales should be received. Sir Hans 
Sloane died in 1753, at the age of ninety-two ; George IV. was 
born in 1762! I will fall back, therefore, and quote Dame 
Berners once more, who says most discreetly of this very 
fish: “I haue but lytyll knowlege of it, and me were loth 
to wryte more than I knowe and haue prouyd.”’ 
Carp usually spawn in May or June, the males becoming 
very demonstrative at that season. The female esconces 
herself in a convenient weed-bed, and quietly deposits her 
spawn, which is greenish in colour. Usually two or more 
males remain in waiting upon her, giving expression to their 
impatience by leaping from the water after the manner of a 
salmon. Von Siebold describes the process of impregnation. 
When the female has deposited her quota of eggs for the day, 
and swims away to sun herself or to search for food, one of 
the attendant males dashes on to the vacant bed and distributes 
his milt around the ova. The eggs are very small and 
numerous, being reckoned as amounting to three-quarters 
of a million in a female weighing 10 Ib. But this proportion 
is far from fixed. Thus, whereas Frank Buckland found the 
roe of a carp weighing 164 lb. to weigh 54 Ib. (nearly one-third 
* The Practical Fisherman, by J. H. Keene. London, 188r. 
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