Fish Culturists' Association. 23 



sioners of Fisheries of four of the Xew England States came to 1113- place 

 and wished me to go to Holyoke, on the Connecticut river, and see if I 

 could make a success in hatching shad artificially. I agi-eed to go. I 

 arrived at the fisher^' at South Hadley dam and told the people that I had 

 come to hatch shad artificially. They thought I was crazy and treated 

 me accordingly. My first experiment in the use of hatching apparatus 

 was to build the same kind of troughs that I used for hatching trout, with 

 the exception that I slanted some of them a gi-eat deal more than I did 

 others. I put the spawn in the troughs and I found that in the troughs 

 that had the most fall the spawn floated down and out of the end. That 

 was the first time that I had discovered how light the shad spawn was. 

 It is as light in the water as a bubble is in the air. The next morning I 

 came to see my troughs ; they were nearly all broken down by some 

 malicious person. I fixed some of them so that I kept the spawn in the 

 trough : the next day they were nearly all dead. I could see the fish 

 begin to form, but it was suffering for lack of circulation of water. The 

 next day they were all dead. I saw what I had to contend with. I saw 

 that the spawn needed a great circulation of water, and the difficulty was 

 to get some thing that would give them the circulation and not float the 

 spawn away. The second day I had a dozen different kinds of hatching 

 apparatus. All failed until the sixth day, when I was standing in the 

 water with a candle box with a sieve bottom, and tipping it one way and 

 another until I tipped the lower edge so that the current struck the bot- 

 tom. The spawn began to boil up and kept in motion. The mystery 

 was solved ! The second day the fish showed life in the eggs, and the 

 next day they hatched. I made two trials to see what percentage I could 

 hatch. I put ten thousund eggs in the box and hatched all but seven 

 eggs. The next trial I hatched all but ten. The Commissioners and 

 everybody was delighted— myself in particular. In about fifteen days I 

 hatched fifteen millions, and in 1870 the Commissioners of Fisheries 

 reported that there was sixty per cent, more shad in the Connecticut river 

 than there was in the year 1802, and I believe the fishing has been as 

 good every year since. 



In 1869 I experimented in hatching whitefish. I took the spawn in 

 the same manner that I do the trout, except that they have to be stirred 

 gently for twenty minutes to keep them from sticking together. I have 

 hatched a good many every year since that time. I hatched them the 

 three first years on gi-avel and on trays four inches deep in the ti'ough. 

 Last year Mr. M. G. Holton invented a hatching box that will be the 

 means of stocking all of our great lakes with whitefish and salmon trout ^ 

 equal to their best day, and I believe it can be done in four years. It 

 saves nineteen-twentieths of the room in the size of the house, and can 



