REPORT ON ARTIFICIAL FISH-CULTURE. 37 



Proprietors of ponds bestow ordinarily some 

 care upon stocking them, but all that relates to 

 reproduction of fish in our rivers is left to mere 

 chance, and while bitterly lamenting the constant 

 and rapid decrease of their products, we have not, 

 till now, given sufficient consideration to the reme- 

 dies for the evil. 



Public attention was at last awakened to this 

 question by a lecture delivered two years since, 

 at the Academy of Science by one of our most 

 distinguished zoologists, M. de Quatrefages, for- 

 merly one of the Faculty of Science of Toulouse. 

 This learned and elegant writer, gave our agri- 

 culturists useful counsel on the art of. bringing 

 up fish, and strongly urged upon them the putting 

 in practice of a process of multiplying their num- 

 bers, long well known to physiologists, and often 

 experimentally employed in their cabinets, viz : 

 that of artificially fecundating the eggs. We know 

 by the labors of Spallanzani, and by the experi- 

 mental researches with which you, yourself, Mr. 

 Minister, and your ancient colleague, Prevost, (of 

 Geneva,) twenty-five years enriched science, that 

 all fecundation is the result of the action exer- 

 cised upon the egg at its state of maturity by 

 the living spermatozoa with which the semen 

 or milt is charged, that this action takes place 

 through the direct contact of those two repro- 



