NATIONAL FISHERY CONGRESS. 317 



with false bottoms guided by upright standards used in raising and lowering the 

 false bottoms for the better examination of the fish. Each compartment will carry 

 about 250 fish at a time, or about twice that number during the season, as the num- 

 bers are continually being added to and taken from, as new arrivals come in and the 

 older ones are stripped and sent to market. 



The fish are sorted into three classes, which are denominated soft, medium, and 

 hard, and are handled as little as possible. The softs are examined the next day after 

 being sorted, the ripe ones stripped, and the others reclassified if necessary the 

 mediums on the third day and the hards in about a week, it having been found by 

 experience that very little spawn is lost by thus holding and very much unnecessary 

 handling is obviated. 



Although large numbers of fish were not penned at Put-in Bay the past season, 

 owing to almost continuous gales, the experiment proved a complete success, as show- 

 ing what can be done in an ordinary season. Over 10,000,000 eggs of good quality 

 were taken, and it should be remembered that but for the penning the eggs would 

 have gone to market in the abdomens of the fish and been lost. The fish, notwith- 

 standing the adverse circumstances under which they were taken, did remarkably 

 well, and only seven were lost because of becoming diseased, and they had been 

 injured in the pound nets before coming to our hands. The last fish turned over to 

 the fishermen were in as fine condition as if just taken from a pound, and some of 

 them had been in confinement for a month. 



As to the limitations and results, they must be largely a matter of speculation. 

 With penning successfully carried out there would seem to be practically no limit to 

 the number of fry which can be turned out, and then comes the question, To what extent 

 is the hatching of whitetish beneficial? The statistics do not answer the question in a 

 manner entirely encouraging to the fish-culturists, and yet I believe I am safe in 

 saying that there is not a commercial fisherman on Lake Erie who does not think that 

 the hatcheries, have done much to increase the take of whitefish, many of them openly 

 asserting that but for the work of artificial propagation whitefish would be practically 

 extinct in the lake. They cite in proof of this that while the increase has not been 

 what they might hope, the whitefish has reasonably held its own, while all other 

 commercial fishes have rapidly fallen off. 



There is another encouraging feature to be noted. If common report is to be 

 taken for anything, the catch of whitefish has been greater in Lake Erie the past 

 season than for several years past. This is especially the case with the gill nets in 

 deep water, also with the pounds at the head of the lake, so the writer is informed 

 on what seems to be trustworthy authority. Of course it is too early yet to have 

 reliable statistics as to just what the catch was. The fish were small and of quite 

 uniform size, which lead the fishermen to the conclusion that at least a considerable 

 portion of them were the result of the large hatch of the season 1895-96, when 

 121,000,000 fry were planted in Lake Erie from Put-in Bay station, and when the 

 Detroit hatchery of the Michigan Fish Commission and the Sandwich hatchery of 

 the Dominion Government of Canada made specially large plants, all of which found 

 their way into Lake Erie. 



In common with other fish-culturists the writer believes that the work of arti- 

 ficially increasing the number of whitefish in Lake Erie and the other waters to 

 which this fish is indigenous will be greatly improved when some practical way is 



