126 Tzventy-se7>ciith Annual Meeting 



the different products, their food valtie for different uses and in 

 connection with the raising of dift'erent kinds of stock, but also 

 the preparation and enrichment of the soil, the development of 

 the seed, the growth of the plant, the dangers that threaten it, 

 the diseases that attack it, its protection and improvement, are all 

 subjects of continued investigation. 



Contrast with this, if you please, the conditions which exist in 

 fish culture: "Despite the painstaking investigations of a few 

 scientific workers and the encouragement of some official boards 

 with limited means, aquaculture has been almost as much neg- 

 lected as agriculture has been advanced. The incentive given by 

 the work of Hoy, Milner and Forbes on the Great Lakes a quar- 

 ter of a centurv ago has not been followed up; chance has been 

 relied upon to control the conditions in these vast inland seas, 

 and the fundamental features of the problem are as little under- 

 stood to-day as when there was no drain on the life in these 

 water:. No farmer is so ignorant as to suppose he could scatter 

 the seeds of a grain whose development was entirely imknown 

 over the land of which he was equally ignorant, and leaving the 

 land could hope on his return in the fall to reap a bountiful har- 

 vest. And yet this is just what has been looked for in the case 

 of the whitefish.'' This aspect of the question was very sharply 

 put by Prof. Jacob Reighard in a paper read before the Inter- 

 national Fisheries Congress in iSc)^: "If we inquire into the 

 facts concerning the suilficiency (jf the present methods of arti- 

 ficial propagation,'' he says, "we find that so far as the whitefish is 

 concerned, there is no question as to the success of the earlier 

 stages of the process. Several hundred million ova are taken 

 annually and placed in the hatcheries and of these usually from 

 80 to 90 per cent, are hatched and placed in the waters of the 

 Great Lakes — 165,000,000 in Lake Erie alone in 1888. 



"This is very nearly all that we know about these young white- 

 fish. Aboiit their food habits we know only that in captivity 

 they eat certain species of Crustacea. Whether in their natural 

 habitat they eat other animals in addition to these Crustacea or 

 in preference to them, we do not know. Tt is uncertain at what 

 age thev begin to feed or how nnich they require. We do not 

 knov>- their natural enemies. We do not know whether they thrive 

 best in running water or in standing water, in shallow water or 

 in deep water, whether at the surface or near the bottom. What 

 changes of food habits or of habitat the fish undergo as they 

 grow older is still deeper mystery. 



"Our problem is to place young whitefish in the Great Lakes 



