ii6 Our Food Mollusks 



locality, a neighboring shore most often produces enough 

 seed to meet the demand. When widespread failure 

 continues for three or four years, an abundant supply of 

 seed certainly could be obtained from other parts of the 

 coast. Failure is most common in the North, but the 

 New England planters might obtain seed in an emergency 

 from the Chesapeake, the Carolina sounds, or even from 

 the Gulf, where the set is practically always good. The 

 present difficulty in this is simply that seed is not yet 

 gathered for sale in large amount on these sections of the 

 coast. All coasts do not fail at the same time. During 

 the lean years in Long Island Sound following the large 

 set of 1899, seed oysters were very numerous along the 

 shores of Pamlico Sound and elsewhere, and were left un- 

 touched. 



When the oyster industry shall have become as greatly 

 developed in other sections as it now is in the North, 

 and when everywhere the gathering of seed shall have 

 become an extensive business, there will be no possibil- 

 ity, with present means of transportation, of suffering in 

 any section from the lack of it. The seed problem, when- 

 ever it arises, will, in the future, be solved in this man- 

 ner. Natural oyster seed is, and probably always will be, 

 sufficiently abundant to supply all demands. It is only 

 necessary to gather it from natural beds or on collectors 

 and distribute it cheaply, and without doubt this can and 

 will be done. 



There have been many ardent expressions of the hope 

 that the time might soon arrive when long neck and little 

 neck clams shall be reared for market from artificially 

 fertilized eggs. It would be well if that hope might now 

 be completely destroyed. With these forms such a prac- 

 tice is an impossibility. The culture of clams by any 



