VALUE OF NOEWEGIAN LAKES FOR FISH CULTURE. 547 



part of the peninsula, the pike, so far as is known in a single place in 

 western ISTorway, where it ordinarily does not exist. In a single place 

 systematic and artificial fish-culture has been carried on extensively for 

 centuries as the sole means of subsistence of a community consisting of 

 many thousand individuals, namely, in Laguna di Comachio, near the 

 Adriatic Sea south of Venice. But no one thought about imitating this 

 business before last year, though the same or a similar opportunity for 

 such industry is found in many places in France as well as in Italy. The 

 objects of culture here are fish which do not, like the salmon, spawn in 

 fresh water, and afterwards reach their greatest development in the 

 sea, but which, on the contrary, spawn in the sea, while their young at 

 stated times frequent the streams in the shallow lagoons, there to reach 

 their full develoi^ment, chief among them being the eel, which has the 

 same habit here in the North as in the South. 



But the commonly -practiced fish-culture of the Chinese, Eomans, and 

 modern Europeans is restricted chiefly to species of fish of particularly 

 great fecundity, which live in sluggish waters of an average higher tem- 

 perature, which spawn in spring or summer, and whose eggs are hatched 

 without difficulty of any kind in the space of a few days, namely, carp 

 aud its Iviudred genera, together with the pike and perch, to which may 

 be added the eel, whose young may be easily collected in their migrations 

 n]y the river courses. The choicer species of fish belonging to the many 

 different species of the salmon tiimily, the most of which spawn late in 

 the autumn or in the winter, have been the subjects of artificial culture 

 in verj^ few places. 



The artificial fertilization of the spawn of the nobler species of fishes, 

 the salmon, in the manner in which it has been practiced for the last 

 twenty or thirty years, was not, however, entirely unknown ; for there 

 are found printed works which describe it dating from the middle of the 

 preceding century and later; but these aroused general attention as 

 little as the j)ractical performance of the operation, which took place 

 liere and there. About the year 1842, when, as before remarked, a 

 peasant, Eemy, in the Vosges, concluded to attempt the artificial fertil- 

 ization and hatching of trout-eggs, the affair first was fortunately brought 

 to the knowledge of French scientific men who appreciated its great 

 economical importance to the nation, and many of these have since that 

 time with the greatest zeal labored to bring, and have also succeeded in 

 bringing, the mode of operation to the desired perfection. Among these 

 many scientific men Mr. Coste, professor of embrj'ology in the College 

 of France in Paris, a member of the French academy, is generally re- 

 garded as the one who has labored the most and the most successfully 

 for the advancement of this thing, in which duty he was strongly sup- 

 ported by the Emperor Napoleon. Since the year 1852, one may regard 

 the plan of operation to have been brought to perfection, and since that 

 time the business, so far as the salmon-like fishes are concerned, had 

 been carried on to a steadily increasing extent every^vhere in Euroi^e 

 and America, where the opportunity is presented. 



