1-* Tiventy-si.vth Annual Meeting 



tirely unlike those that occur in the natural water. What the 

 gentlemen don't want to lose sigiit of- is this question of the fish- 

 ermen stripping eggs and returning them into the water. On 

 that 1 take the same position that Air. i'ost has. I know it is 

 an argument which has been raised against artificial propaga- 

 tion, for the purpose of discouraging and discrediting our work. 

 That has been one of the subterfuges tliat has been used. I 

 will not go to the extent of saying I don't believe it ought to 

 be done; but you cannot speak of it in the same breath as you 

 can of the artificial propagation of fish. It is one of the 

 singular things in human experience, and I don't be- 

 lieve there is another instance where artificial means have 

 discounted natural means in their results as in fish culture. What 

 does it mean? It means simply this: that if you take the eggs 

 of the salmonoids, which' are easily handled, and impregnate those 

 eggs and get upwards of 90 per cent, as we do, it is not an excep- 

 tion. There is no question but that you have largely increased 

 Nature's ways of doing it in the matter of impregnation. That 

 is not the end of it. That is the beginning of artificial impregna- 

 tion. The great advantage in natural imj^regnation is that you 

 isolate the eggs from their enemies until they are born fish. That 

 is where you get a great advantage. The fact of the matter is, 

 when an egg is cast on a natural spawning bed — I don't care 

 whether it is in a stream or the great lakes — that egg is abso- 

 lutely helpless — it is unprotected. The storms of winter come 

 and stir up the silt from the bottom of these inuuense seas, and a 

 good proportion of these eggs are covered with mud. In addition 

 to that, if there is a choice viand for any fish, it is the eggs of its 

 own or the eggs of some other variety of fish. You isolate the 

 ova in artificial propagation from their enemies, and that is where 

 the great percentage of gain is made by artificial means. 



I would not discourage the idea of impregnating them and 

 putting them back, although I don't think there is a great deal 

 gained by it. Instead of having those eggs thrown away, if you 

 onlv get five per cent, of impregnation, you have gained that 

 much; they have not gone absolutely to waste. 



In this matter of natural impregnation of eggs, I hold with 

 Mr. Clark, and with some oi the other gentlemen, and it seems to 

 me that the discovery of Vrasski and Seth Green — a re-discovery, 

 perhaps, by an independent observer of the process of dry fertiliza- 

 tion of eggs shows a great improvement over natural methods. 

 Mr. Greai'^ once told me that in the beginning, when he began 

 to strip fish, he only got an impregnation of about 25 or 30 per 



