SOME BRIEF REMINISCENCES OF THE EARLY DAYS OF FISH-CULTURE 



IN THE UNITED STATES. 



BY LIVINGSTON STONE, 

 Superintendent of United States Fish Commission Station at Cape Vincent, New York. 



About a third of a century ago a strange story began to be spread abroad in this 

 country that a man in western New York was hatching trout eggs thousands upon 

 thousands and that he was rearing the fish and feeding them in ponds, and that 

 there was literally no end to the number of fish he could hatch. The story naturally 

 made a decided sensation throughout the country, but of all the people who heard the 

 story there were very few at first who believed it. The present age of almost daily 

 recurring marvels had hardly begun then, and people were more incredulous and 

 slower to accept apparent miracles than they are now; and then again, the country 

 being in the throes of civil war at the time, it followed that discoveries in peaceful 

 arts did not attract the attention that they would have done in quieter times. But 

 the story about the man who was hatching thousands upon thousands of trout steadily 

 gained ground. Presently the great New York dailies took it up, and soon after it 

 came to be an accepted fact that something very wonderful was certainly being done 

 by this New York trout- hatcher. 



In the meantime the man himself, quietly working away in Caledonia, had 

 succeeded in actually proving beyond a doubt that the hatching of trout on an 

 immense scale not as an experiment, but as a practical industry was within the 

 easy reach of human skill. It was the first time that this had been accomplished. 

 Amateur and scientific experiments on a small scale had been made by various per- 

 sons at various times, and the method of hatching fish artificially had been known 

 for a century, but it remained for Seth Green to introduce into America the hatching 

 of fish as a practical and valuable industry, and to him belong the credit and the 

 honor of opening the way to the vast practical work that has since been accomplished 

 in this country in hatching and rearing fish, and to him eminently belongs the title, 

 justly earned, of the '* father of American fish-culture." 



A year or two after Seth Green had inaugurated American fish-culture at 

 Caledonia, the writer established the Cold Spring trout ponds at Charlestown, New 

 Hampshire, but strange to say, up to this time, although Seth Green's operations in 

 New York had been so fascinating and so promising, no one else in this country had 

 taken up the breeding of trout at which he had been so successful. 



The time, however, was now ripe for the spread of trout culture, and very soon 

 after the establishment of the Cold Spring trout ponds trout-breeding places sprang 

 up in all directions. Raising trout suddenly became fashionable and popular. During 

 the first two years of his trout- breeding experience the writer received letters from 

 almost every State in the Union, written by persons actually engaged in, or more 



337 

 F. C. B. 189722 



