292 ROMAN AND MODERN PISCICULTURE 



modern Pisciculture — a term first used some three hundred 

 years after his death— can hardly be sustained. His discoveries 

 interest only from a historical point of view. 



The middle of the eighteenth century witnessed an improve- 

 ment on Pinchon's plan. In Sweden (where the care taken to 

 protect fish even prohibited the ringing of bells at the spawning 

 season) the bream, perch, and mullet attach their eggs either 

 to rocks, or twigs of pine. 



Lund shut up males and females for three or four days in 

 three boxes, furnished with twigs of pine, etc. (on which the 

 fish spawned) , and pierced with little holes to allow the entrance 

 of water. He succeeded at his first attempt in raising from 

 50 female bream, 3,100,000 fry; from 100 perch, 3,215,000 fry ; 

 and from 100 mullet, 4,000,000 fry. 



Jacobi of Westphalia, the first real inventor of practical 

 fecundation by artificial means, experimented on trout and 

 salmon for sixteen years before attaining definite success. 



He pressed in turn the eggs and milt into a vase half filled 

 with water which he kept gently stirred with his hand. The 

 fertilised eggs were at once placed in a grated box inside a 

 larger chest, in which Jacobi had inserted at the sides and at 

 the top fine metallic gratings to allow the easy flow in and 

 out of water over the sand or gravel lying at the bottom. 

 The apparatus was set in a trench by the side of a brook, or, 

 better still, in an artificial channel into which springs were led. 

 The young fish after hatching lived for three or four weeks 

 on their umbilical sac, and were then passed into a reservoir. 



By these simple means Jacobi, who for his services was 

 granted by England a pension for life, solved the problem of 

 protecting fertilised eggs against their enemies, and yet of 

 leaving them in surroundings not unhke those of Nature. 

 The experiment, as far as it went, succeeded admirably. 



In Great Britain 1 Shaw, Andrew, Young, Knox, and 

 Boccius, and in Germany, Blooch, and others carried on, at 

 various times and witJi varying methods and measures of 



1 Leonard Mascall, owing to his recipes for preserving spawn in his Booke 

 of Fishing 1590, "must be looked upon as the pioneer of fish-culture in 

 England," according to Mr. R. B. Marston, op. cit., 35. 



