176 



American Fisheries Society 



It therefore seems that the salmon cease to eat before 

 they enter the river. 



In the Dead Brook enclosure the salmon seem to find 

 an ideal abode, and the deaths among them during the 

 season appear to be caused by serious wounds received 

 in capture, or, as sometimes happens, by excessively high 

 temperature of water in July or August. Meanwhile 

 their reproductive organs undergo a normal development 

 and about the 20th or 22d of October the most forward 

 of them are ready to lay their eggs. When they reach 

 this condition they try to find swift water and, working, 

 up the stream, are entrapped at the head of their enclos- 

 ure, dipped out and manipulated. When the salmon are 

 collected, no attempt is made to distinguish between the 

 sexes, but it has always turned out at the spawning sea- 

 son that the females are more numerous than the males. 

 A rough shed shelters the workmen and here the eggs are 

 taken and fecundated and packed on trays in which they 

 are carefully conveyed to the Craig Brook hatchery, some 

 two miles distant. Here the incubation is carried to the 

 shipping point, and most of the eggs are then transferred 

 for hatching to an auxiliary station at Little Spring 

 Brook, a tributary of the East Branch of the Penobscot, 

 situated about 120 miles above the mouth of the river. 

 The fry hatched here are all liberated in the Penobscot 

 river within a few miles of the hatchery, on the very 

 grounds where they would have hatched naturally had 

 their mothers been allowed to follow their natural in- 

 stincts. A few of the eggs have sometimes been hatched 

 at the Craig Brook Station and the resulting fry placed 

 in the Penobscot or tributaries nearer the sea. 



During the past ten years the number of young salmon 

 artificially hatched and thus liberated in the Penobscot 

 has been as follows : 



