SPONGE CULTURE. 
a 
By JULES COTTE, 
Adjunct Professor at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy, Marseille, France. 
a 
[Translated from the French.] 
One of the greatest glories of the nineteenth century undoubtedly will be 
its patient, persevering, and methodical exploitation of nature’s resources. It 
must be acknowledged, however, that not everything has as yet been obtained 
from the sea that may well be expected. Great progress may be looked for in 
the propagation of useful species inhabiting its depths, although in this field of 
work, by its excessive mobility, the limits of exploited areas must be determined 
in a very arbitrary way. 
Great anxiety has prevailed for a long time among those interested in the 
sponge fishing and sponge trade because of the improvidence with which the 
sponge grounds were being worked. It has been the most productive methods 
of fishing that were being sought, without any thought of the morrow. It is 
important to combat these unfortunate tendencies, and several procedures, of 
which each has many partisans, have been presented: One is the regulation of 
the number of fishing appliances (for example, the limitation of the number of 
divers, as in Tunis); another, the complete prohibition of certain means (the 
prohibition of divers, as temporarily promulgated in Tunis and elsewhere) ; 
another, the fixing of a minimum size for the sponges taken; another, apply- 
ing to the fishing of sponges the principle of regulated cutting, with alterna- 
tion of rest and fishing for each of the banks visited by the fishermen; the tem- 
porary prohibition of fishing (several months a year) in order to allow the larve 
to leave the sponges and to take root; and, lastly, the propagation of sponges 
by methods of culture. 
DEFINITION OF SPONGE CULTURE. 
The term “sponge culture’’ must be understood in the widest sense possible. 
It comprises all the methods which man may adopt in order to obtain under his 
direct supervision or by his intervention an increase in the output of commercial 
sponges from any given locality. It would be sponge culture to carry sponges 
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