26 AMERICAN FISHERIES SOCIETY. 



best of all, producing 60,000 fish from 200,000 eggs. They were 

 taken on March 21st by the dry method, let stand five minutes 

 and added half a pint of water and kept in motion twenty 

 minutes by tipping the pan from side to side and occasionly 

 using the tail of a fish. The object of this was to keep the eggs 

 from sticking together, so that they might be treated as free 

 eggs. After this more water was added and the eggs allowed to 

 rest for twenty minutes. They were then washed twice and 

 placed in a McDonald jar. They were taken at 5:10 p. m., were 

 all loose at 6:30 p. m., and at 7 p. m. next day many were stuck 

 fast to the jar and the tubes. On March 30th those still loose 

 were placed in another jar, and on April 2d a few dead ones 

 were observed, while four days later the eggs grouped together 

 in bunches which increased in size until on April 15th, the 

 bunches were of the size of walnuts and covered with fungus. 

 On the 20th. a few hatched and on the 21st all that were good 

 came out. From this lot we got 60,000 fish in thirty days with 

 a temperature varying from forty to sixty-five degrees. 



The fish are the most minute of any that I have hatched and 

 it troubled us to keep them. A strainer tube inclosing a siphon 

 such as we use for whitefish, was entirely too large, for the fish 

 passed through it with ease. After trying several things and 

 having the aquarim overflow, and the fish go out into the trout 

 ponds, we devised a spiral wire rolled on a stick of four inches 

 diameter and covered with thin muslin; this kept the fish and 

 allowed a small stream to flow out of the siphon which was 

 inserted. I will here say that the lower end of such siplion 

 should be placed in a jar of water in order that it does not suck 

 dry. The difficulty with siphons as outlets is their tendency to 

 empty faster than the inflow, and in consequence they empty 

 themselves and then decline to start again. Placing their lower 

 end in a fruit jar overcomes this failing; they will suck no 

 lower than the top of the jar holding the lower end. I used this 

 plan in the New York Aquarium in 1876, but do not claim to 

 have originated it. Of the eggs remaining attached to the first 

 jar and its tubes in a single layer, not one hatched — most of the 

 fish came from eggs which were in masses surrounded by fungus. 

 This year's experience upsets that of my eighteen previous years 



