Meehan. — Goitre Among Trout 69 



we consider that they have from 125,000 to 150,000 marketable fi ;h. It 

 is hardly likely that the disease was entirely wiped out, for in all prob- 

 ability when they said they did not have goitre in the ponds, they were 

 referring to fish with the thyroid enlarged; they had not looked down 

 the throat of the fish and seen the inflammation. 



We also had goitre at the state hatchery at Bellefonte. It was due 

 there, I believe, to overcrowding rather than to overfeeding (for those 

 fish were not overfed), and perhaps to the ponds not being kept just 

 as clean as they should have been, the superintendent having been ill 

 for a long time. I started housecleaning there, and also thinned out 

 the fish, with the result that the superintendent reported to me last 

 spring that goitre had almost entirely disappeared. I went over the 

 ponds again, netted fish after fish, using the dip net, and found scarcely 

 any traces of the disease, although here and there I did find a fish that 

 had a slight inflammation of the throat. Of course, I found any quan- 

 tity of old trout that had the swelling, but the inflammation had gone. 



Dr. Field, Boston, Mass.: Did you say who the pathologist was 

 who made the investigations? 



Mr. Meeiian : Dr. David Marine, of Western Reserve University, 

 and Dr. Leonard. 



Dr. Field : I asked that for this reason : When the question of the 

 possibility of the disease being cancer came up I placed the matter in 

 charge of the cancer hospital in Boston, in the hands of an eminent 

 pathologist, a cancer specialist, Dr. E. E. Tyzzer, of Harvard Medical 

 School, Boston. We had some difficulty in getting material, but we 

 obtained it at last, and Dr. Tyzzer is at work on it. His report is not 

 yet prepared. 



Mr. Meehan : I might say that the results of Dr. Marine's investi- 

 gations were published in two bulletins by the Department of Fisheries 

 of Pennsylvania. They may be had upon application. One was pub- 

 lished last year and one this spring. 



Q. Is it generally believed to be a new disease? I can recall it 

 as far back as 1875. 1 remember when I was a small boy of seeing 

 a trout in an old pond that showed unmistakable signs of this disease. 



Mr. Meehan : We have had it for years. 



Dr. Tarleton H. Bean, Albany, X. Y. : Some of our stations in 

 Xew York developed this thyroid tumor, notably the one at Bath, and 

 before that the station at (old Spring Harbor on Long Island. 



Not being able to have the services of a competent bacteriologist 

 or pathologist, we proceeded to change the water supply, because we 

 believed that the origin of the throat tumor lay in impure water. 

 Whether or not it does rest there, the changing of the water supply has 

 eliminated goitre absolutely. Not a case of goitre has been reported 

 for some years from either of those stations. It existed at Cold Spring- 

 Harbor 20 years ago at least, and caused the loss of many hundreds of 

 brood fish. At Bath the loss was even more serious. It affected the 

 brook trout and the brown trout more especially, but rarely involved 

 the rainbow trout. A strange circumstance with reference to the spread 



