14 AMERICAN FISH CULTURE. 



protection of the young from the dangers to which they are 

 exposed in their natural haunts ; assisting and in a great 

 degree improving on nature. It may still be asked, can 

 you assist or improve on nature? To this I respond, that 

 if the fish culturist has the impregnated spawn under his 

 own protection and supervision, it will be subjected to none 

 of the casualties to which it is exposed in the stream where 

 the parent fish deposits it. That no flood will sweep it 

 away or cover it with dirt, sawdust, or tanbark. That no 

 fish of its own or other species, sailing around like pirate 

 craft, will devour it as it is ejected. That no eel or lamprey 

 will burrow into the gravel-covered nest to make a dainty 

 meal of its contents. That no duck, wild or tame, or long- 

 legged wading-bird will gobble it up. That no water-rat, 

 muskrat, mink, or other predacious quadruped will feed 

 upon it. I would now in return ask my interrogator, if 

 ten out of a hundred eggs should escape all these adverse 

 contingencies and produce ten infant fish, if he supposes 

 their own father and mother or other fish would hesitate 

 for an instant to pouch them, or that aquatic birds which 

 would have gobbled them up in embryo would spare them 

 now? Does he think that three out of the ten infants 

 would arrive at mature fishhood ? Close observers think 

 not, especially if they were ten infant trout or salmon, each 

 weighed down with the umbilical sac of aliment which it 

 carries under its belly for forty or fifty days. But if the 

 fish culturist puts the eggs of salmon or trout into his hatch- 

 ing-trough, he will likely get eighty or ninety young fish 

 from a hundred. If trout, seventy or eighty of the fry 



