FIFTEENTH ANNUAL MEE' 



New York Fish Commission placed them upon the straw cover- 

 ings of wine bottles, hung in ponds, and also placed them in the 

 hatchery in running water. Others were put on tin pans hung 

 in the ponds and the McDonald jars, under several different con- 

 ditions; one of these was to place the newly taken eggs in jars 

 and by slowly rotating it to leave a covering of eggs all around 

 the inside. Another mode was to put them into jars and give 

 them a strong circulation of water to prevent their adhering in 

 masses as much as possible. The third method was to give ajar 

 a very slight circulation and let them mass together. 



The eggs exposed to light on the straw and tin pans in the 

 open ponds out of doors, were soon covered with fungus and 

 did the worst of all, although a few hatched. 



The first eggs obtained this year were taken on February 

 25th, to the number of 400,000. Some of these were placed 

 upon the straw coverings, referred to above, and others were 

 put in jars, the main portion being thus deposited. Both these 

 lots began to hatch on April 5th, forty days after, and when I last 

 saw them on April gtli, there were perhaps 10,000 already 

 hatched; while the other eggs, taken on the same day and sub- 

 jected to the same treatment, looked as though they would not 

 hatch for four or five days yet. At this same date (April 9th) 

 a lot of eggs taken on March 6th, nine days after the former lot, 

 had already begun hatching. This seems to be a very wide mar- 

 gin of time for eggs which only take from thirty to forty days 

 to hatch. The time occupied in hatching this year exceeds that 

 of last season, on account of the severe cold weather we have 

 had throughout March. The eggs which were taken in thin 

 layers on the inside of the glass jars by rotating, as above de- 

 scribed, have done very badly. The others are doing fairly 

 well for smelt eggs. 



I sent Mr. F. N. Clark some eggs this year, cautioning him 

 not to throw them away, no matter how bad they looked on 

 the outside, how much fungus there might be there, nor how 

 foul an odor might arise from them. At the same time I had 

 fears that he might do this ; for in our experiments we had 

 found that the decaying eggs on the outside masses were so foul, 

 that nothing but previous experience could have convinced us 



