874 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



3 J pounds ; that is, a fish which has lived two summers, consequently is 

 eighteen mouths old, will weigh 2^ to 3J pounds the year following. 

 The growth may turn out to be even more favorable in a warm year, or if 

 only a few fishes have been placed in a pond, as we shall see farther 

 on, in the chapter treating of pond-culture and the operations of the 

 culturist. 



Carps may reach a very advanced age, as specimens are to be found 

 in Austria over one hundred and forty years old. 



The increase in length only continues up to a certain age, but its cir- 

 cumference will increase up to its thirty-fifth year. 



I have seen some common carp in the southern parts of Europe — in 

 the lowlands of Hungary, Servia, Croatia, Wallachia, as also in Mol- 

 davia and the Buckowina — which weighed from 30 to 40 pounds and 

 morcj measuring nearly 3J feet in length by 2| feet in circumference. 



Old men, whose credibility and truthfulness could not be doubted, 

 assured me and gave the most detailed accounts of the capture of this 

 species of fish in former years, giants, which weighed from 50 to 60 

 pounds, and which they had seen themselves. During the Crimean war 

 in 1853, a French engineer ofl&cer, stationed at Widdin, on the Danube, 

 in Turkey, killed a carp by a bullet-shot, some distance below the city ; 

 this fish weighed 67 pounds. I had some of its scales in my possession, 

 of which each had a diameter of 2J inches. Their structure indicated 

 to a certainty that the age of this fish could be no more than twenty- 

 four years at the most. It is a well-known fact that two large carps, 

 weighing from 42 to 55 pounds, were taken several years ago on one of 

 the grand duke of Oldenburg's domains in Northern Germany. They 

 had been kept in some particularly favorable water, productive of 

 plentiful food, and had been used as breeding-fishes. These two speci- 

 mens might, from their size, be calculated to be comparatively very 

 aged fishes : it was proved that they were only fifteen years old. If 

 we may credit the chronicles kept centuries ago by old families, and 

 especially by the monks, who had taken possession of all the best local- 

 ities along the banks of the beautiful blue Danube, then still greater 

 giants had been caught, and that in the waters of the Danube itself. A 

 chronicle of the monastery of Molk, in Austria, refers to a carp weighing 

 78 pounds, which had been captured on Ascension Day in 1520. Another 

 record speaks of a carp which had been taken in the third decennium 

 of the present century in the lake of Zug, in Switzerland, and which 

 weighed 90 pounds. These giants are certainly only wonderful excep- 

 tions, and have become celebrated through the scarcity of such occur- 

 rences, but still these facts are encouraging illustrations that it is possi- 

 ble for such large specimens to grow up in favorable water. All the 

 countries, where these large fishes have been found and which are situ- 

 ated between the Black, the Korth, and the Baltic Seas, are pretty 

 nearly such as have a late spring and a long, cold winter. Near 

 Widdin the Danube has been frozen repeatedly. There the carp passes 



