72 American Fisheries Society 



sufficient water supply, the benefit of clean ponds and plenty of range, 

 I would hesitate to endorse any claim that the mere full feeding was 

 the cause of the disease, since my own experience in feeding fish shows 

 the contrary. At one period in life I was engaged in stock raising, and 

 the same principle holds true there. 1 have found that in every in- 

 stance when fish or young of any kind were fed generously and with 

 a degree of intelligence and given proper surrounding, they were the 

 very best of their kind. Our breeders of cattle, horses and all varieties 

 of live stock are good, generous feeders, and they produce the finest 

 specimens of the various kinds of stock they handle. My experience 

 has been that when human beings, stock, fish or anything of the kind 

 are underfed, you then bring about a condition that begets disease; also 

 often when such conditions prevail you find other factors lacking, such 

 as cleanliness, etc. I am not referring, of course, to any particular 

 instance; this is a general statement. Most emphatically, I am not pre- 

 pared to indorse any statement that generous feeding, with good food, 

 will cause disease, provided all the other conditions are right. I think 

 there are a number of fish culturists here who will bear me out when 

 I claim that when fish are generously fed and thinned often enough — 

 and that is very often when they are heavily fed — there will be pro- 

 duced a better fish, likewise there will be less disease and less death 

 than exists among those that are underfed. 



Some years ago 1 presented a paper along these lines before the 

 Society, giving a detailed account of experiments conducted at Nashua, 

 N. H., to ascertain the effect of feeding on growth and egg production. 

 We found in every instance that those best fed made not only the 

 largest rate of growth, but had the smallest death rate; while they 

 likewise produced a very much larger number of eggs. 



The fish I have reference to were the long yearlings, IS or 20 months 

 old. We found those given practically all the food that they would 

 eat made a phenomenal growth and each one of the females — 100 per 

 cent — produced spawn. The average per fish being 900 and over. This 

 is much more than we get out of our average aged brook stock. 



We do not want it to be heralded about that this Society or any 

 member of it believes the feeding of good untainted food in generous 

 quantities — some might call it overfeeding — produces disease. We be- 

 lieve in prevent inn, therefore we believe in generous feeding to pro- 

 duce strong, healthy fish immune from epidemics, which- will produce 

 good results when placed in the public waters. 1 would like to hear 

 from other fish culturists on this subject. 



Mr. Meehan: While it is possible, of course, that we have been mis- 

 taken, and the fish really were overcrowded, it is still peculiar that 

 there should have been a less degree of disease in the ponds in which 

 there had not been the heavy overfeeding. T might say that the over- 

 feeding was to such an extent that it was beyond what the fish ate. 

 Would not that naturally lie supposed to affect the fish in the ponds 

 below where one might expect that the unconsumed food might con- 



