610 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES. 
fishing of sponges destined to be divided into cuttings must be effected with 
greatest care, thus the cost of fishing would be considerably greater than that 
of sponges destined for the trade. The transportation, the care of the sponges, 
the division into cuttings, the purchase and manipulation of the apparatus 
of sponge culture will involve supplementary expenditures, as will also the 
installation and the concession of the pare where the plants are to be made. 
It should not be forgotten that this parc must be established in deep water as 
far as this is possible, so that the cuttings shall not be kept too close to the 
surface; where the light would be too intense for them. It is necessary to 
inclose this pare and to guard it carefully; it was the theft of apparatus and in 
general the lack of protection which forced Schmidt, Fogarty, and Benedict to 
abandon their researches, and it would have been the same with the experiments 
at Sfax if the Direction des Travaux Publics of Tunis had not provided most 
efficient guard. A private individual could not count on so vigilant an assist- 
ance as that of the fishing guards and the custodian of the laboratory of Sfax, 
and would himself have to insure, in a permanent manner, both day and night, 
the guarding of his installations. Schmidt and Buccich seem to have neg- 
lected these various factors of expense in sponge culture in the estimate of the 
cost of their cuttings. The other sponge cultivators keep silent on this subject 
as if it were a secondary one. ‘This may be so from a scientific point of view, 
but from an industrial one it is of vital importance. 
In spite of all that has been published on this subject, it is as yet impossible 
for us to foresee at the present time what is to be gained from an undertaking 
in sponge culture. It is even to be admitted that the result of the enterprise 
would be a considerable loss. I do not mean Buccich’s diminution of value 
of the sponges on account of the central perforation left by the bamboo stick; 
these are small details easily corrected by improvements in technique. We 
must notice that the time needed for healing was always considerable for the 
species with which experiments were made. This loss of time is not a negligi- 
ble quantity. Moreover, the growth of the cuttings is slow. Allemand 
says that they would have to grow four to five years to attain the size reached 
in two years by sponges coming from larve. It is, consequently, not possible 
to see how the products of sponges, obtained at a great cost and bred at a great 
cost likewise, can compete economically with the sponges at present brought 
to market. As long as sponge banks are sufficiently supplied to permit normal 
fishing, until the value of sponge skeletons has increased considerably, it will 
be impossible to adopt any other conclusion than the one here expressed. 
Such could be the case, however, if the yearly increase in size of the cuttings 
were far in excess of the size that would have been attained by the original 
sponge had it not been divided. Schmidt thinks that this is so, without, however, 
