880 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



gable channels with buoys, have last year searched for such firm por- 

 tions of the bottom on which there are no oysters, but could not find, 

 more than eight. There would be a risk to put at once any considera- 

 ble quantity of mother-oysters in all these places, because as yet it is 

 very doubtful whether they w^ould there find all the conditions for the 

 formation of new beds. 



It would be more to the purpose to put, during the month of IMay, 

 oyster and other shells only in one of these places, and in the beginning 

 of June to distribute a few thousand grown oysters over this prepared 

 bottom. Even if in autumn young oysters were found, the experiment 

 could not yet be considered a perfect success before (besides the mother- 

 oysters) oysters have grown there capable of propagating the species. 



I consider it an impossibility to construct oyster-beds in the Baltic. 

 Its water is too cold fur oysters, has too little saltness, and is too stag- 

 nant, because there is no tide. All attempts in this direction made at 

 the Greifswalder Oie, in the Bay of Kiel, and near the islands of Lolland 

 and Sealand, have proved failures. 



Four miles east of Kiel there is a fossil oyster-bed on a hill not far 

 from the shores of the Baltic. Thousands of years ago oysters must, 

 therefore, have lived in the Baltic, when it was connected with the Xorth 

 Sea by broader and deeper channels, and therefore shared its saltness, 

 temperature, and tide. If at the present day oysters could live in the 

 Baltic, they would either not have left it, or they would have immi- 

 grated again from the Northern Kattegat, where there are natural oys- 

 ter-beds. That the oyster will go anywhere where all the conditions for 

 its healthy life are found is proved by their spontaneous immigration 

 into the Limfiord, in the north of Jutland. Till the year 1825 this fiord 

 consisted of a series of brackish lakes, having an outlet into the Katte- 

 gat. During the eighteenth century several futile attempts were made 

 to plant oysters in the Limfiord ; but after the dike separating the west- 

 ern portion of the Limfiord from the North Sea had been broken by 

 the great flood of February 3, 1825, the water of the fiord grew more 

 salty every year, the animals peculiar to the brackish water disappeared 

 gradually, their place was taken bj' animals living in the ISTorth Sea, and 

 among these oysters were discovered in 1851. Their number increased 

 from year to year; in 18C0, 150,000 were caught, and in 1871-'72 more 

 than 7,000,000 were exported to foreign parts. At present one knows 

 ninety-eight places in the Limfiord where oysters live. 



We must therefore give up our tine hopes to see all our coasts fringed 

 with oyster-beds and to see oysters as an article of food on every table. 

 Both the nature of our seas and the nature of the oyster drive us to 

 this conclusion. It will be particularly hard to understand this for those 

 who share the wide-spread opinion that every egg laid by a full-growu 

 oyster is destined to become an oyster. Those animals have the small- 

 est number of eggs or young ones which shelter and nurse their off- 

 spring till they can find their own food. In many lower grades of ani- 



