river it never struck him that herein was the means of 

 increasing a million and a million fold, the production 

 of his lakes and rivers and streams, and reservoirs and 

 ponds -of making, in a word, the waters as fruitful, in 

 their way, as the land is of corn and grain. 



The ancient Greeks and Romans, who paid extraordi- 

 nary attention to the breeding of fish, may, to be sure, 

 have known something of all this ; but if they did, their 

 knowledge did not descend to us, and is therefore to us 

 as though it had never existed. 



As to the means of protecting the eggs of fish from 

 the accidents of the waters, or the voracity of its occu- 

 pants, none of incontestable efficiency are described in 

 books or known in practice; and the proof of this is, 

 that in France and Germany, England and Scotland, 

 and indeed in every part of Europe, there have of late 

 years been general complaints of the gradual yet rapid 

 decline in the supply of various sorts of fish, not only in 

 rivers, but on the coasts'*. 



With respect to what we will call the artificial produc- 

 tion of fish i. e. the taking by man of the female's eggs, 

 and the fecundation of them by means of the male's milt 

 applied by him the first idea of it was conceived no 

 further back than in 1758. It is, we believe, to Count 

 Von Golstein, a German naturalist, that the scientific 

 world is indebted for this grand conception ; as also for 



* Maccullock mentions that in France the annual supply of 

 fresh-water fish before 1789 was 1,200,000. It fell some years 

 back to 700,000, and has diminished since. The decline in our 

 own rivers is well known; and this very year we have had 

 alarming accounts from Scotland of the falling off in salmon. 

 The yield of salt-water fish on the English, Scotch, Dutch, and 

 French coasts is also far from what it was. 



