58 Amei'ican Fisheries Society 



have referred, is so vast as to be almost beyond human 

 comprehension. 



PARENT FISH MASSED ON SPAWNING GROUNDS. 



The young fish hatched out in localities, known as sea- 

 fish nurseries, resemble in their myriads the clouds of 

 mosquitoes in a vast marsh. This is easy to understand 

 when it is remembered that in such areas as the Can- 

 adian fishing grounds on the Labrador Coast, and on the 

 banks of Newfoundland, the spawning cod assemble in 

 such crowded schools that even steam vessels find them- 

 selves impeded when moving through them, and one of 

 our Dominion officers referred to this a few years ago, 

 almost repeating the words of Jacques Cartier, three 

 centuries before, who found it no unusual thing to have 

 the wheels, or rather keels of progress in the sea, blocked 

 by these schools of breeding fish, crowding the surface 

 waters where they were schooling; and Dr. Wakeham, 

 one of the most experienced of Canadian Fishery Inspec- 

 tors, has referred to this same feature, viz : the difficulty 

 at times of navigating through the massed myriads of 

 cod v/hen schooling. 



FLOATING FISH EGGS EASILY KILLED. 



I found in my early studies and experiments that float- 

 ing fish eggs in the sea are very sensitive to unfavorable 

 influences. On the other hand they seem to be indiffer- 

 ent to many influences that might be thought equally det- 

 rimental. A fisherman putting his hand smeared with 

 paraffin oil into a tank of cod eggs caused the death of 

 many thousands, as a film of oil spread over the water 

 and seemed to coat each minute egg and suffocate it. 



I once lost some valuable jars of hatching mackerel 

 eggs by a shower of soot from the funnel of a Govern- 

 ment Survey steamer descending at a most inopportune 

 moment. That was in 1892, in Ireland, when I was the 

 first, I believe, to hatch out larval mackerel, and I had 

 completed some drawings and descriptions but wanted 

 the stages a little older. My work was spoiled, for the 



