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about one hundred hours, with the water ranging from 

 sixty-seven to seventy-four degrees. 



The importance of the sturgeon as an article of food 

 has never been fully appreciated. They contain, when 

 ripe, enormous quantities of eggs ; from fifty to sixty 

 pounds being taken from a full grown fish. From its 

 roe, caviare, the national dish of Russia, is prepared, 

 and a company is now profitably engaged on the Hudson 

 and the upper lakes in its manufacture, and the mature 

 fish attains the enormous size of three hundred pounds. 

 The flesh is yellow and rich, and so nearly does it re- 

 semble meat that it has been nicknamed " Albany beef." 

 It is probably possessed of greater muscle giving and 

 hunger appeasing qualities than that of any other fish, 

 the salmon not excepted. It is delicious food when 

 properly prepared, but having in former times been ex- 

 ceedingly cheap, it came to be despised as the food of 

 the poor. Unless something is done for its cultivation it 

 will soon become a delicacy only of the rich. 



STRIPED BASS, ROCKFISH OF THE SOUTH. Contrary to 

 the opinions of most fish culturists, the ova of the striped 

 bass have been found to be entirely free from the gela- 

 tinous covering which always surrounds the eggs of the 

 perch, pike, black bass, Oswego bass, etc., etc. It flows 

 from the fish readily, is easily hatched, and the young 

 fish quickly develop. 



Fully half a million eggs have been found in females 

 of fair size. Striped bass are more numerous than any 

 other salt water fish of our coast, and yet they are daily 

 growing scarcer. Their habits are little understood, and 

 their times and places of spawning still uncertain. It 

 has been supposed that they spawned "kt different sea- 

 sons of the year, and while some investigators were posi- 

 tive that this act was accomplished in fresh -water, others 



