FATTKNIXG OF OYSTERS. 755 



reproductive organs, it is diverted in another direction, but is retained in the system and has to be 

 deposited somewhere in the hotly. The most extensive deposits of this elaborated living matter 

 occur in the mantle, body, and palps, the color of which rapidly changes from the watery, trans 

 parent condition prevalent during the spawning season to a creamy white. The whole animal also 

 acquires a solidity which it did not possess before; it loses its watery, impoverished appearance, 

 together with its disposition to shrink to a fraction of its original bulk from an extensive loss of 

 fluids when opened. The mantle and palps become opaque and thicker than before, and their 

 substance is softer and more easily lacerated. The change here described undoubtedly affects the 

 connective tissue principally, as elsewhere stoted. The material of the latter has the milky 

 apjMMirance of the reproductive organ when mutilated, and may readily be mistaken for the latter 

 by the inexperienced. It appears that the generative and nutritive functions are opposed to each 

 other in the Oyster as in other animals; all of which indicates, too, the amount of energy which 

 must be expended during the breeding season in the production of germs. Whatever surplus 

 nutriment is stored up in the winter appears to be immediately devoted to the formation of germs 

 upon the arrival of the warm months, when food is also probably most plentiful and when the 

 external conditions are right for the development of the embryos. The eftbrt which the Oyster 

 makes, at the expense of so much material, to reproduce its kind ought to be respected. In the 

 protection of the Oyster during the close season we are simply following the dictates of experience 

 and common sense. 



The account which we have given above of the physiology and interdependence of the 

 fattening and reproductive processes of the Oyster, it seems to me, affords an opportunity to 

 point out how little philosophy there is in the doctrine that Oysters may be fattened by putting 

 them for a day or two in water less salt than that from which they were first taken, in order that 

 they may be water-swollen by the action of osmose, so as to give to them a plump appearance. 

 It is surprising how little dependence is to be placed upon the statements of oystennen and 

 fishermen in regard to the habits of the objects with which they are supposed to be most familiar. 

 And this statement, like many others of a similar kind, has no basis of fact and experimental 

 evidence to rest upon. I may sum np the utter absurdity of the widespread belief in the possi- 

 bility of fattening Oysters by removing them from salt to less salt water for a few days, by 

 saying that it amounts to the same thing as to assert that water is a fatty or oleaginous substance! 



The results of my most recent investigations upon the minute anatomy of Ostrea virginica may 

 be fitly described in this place, since they have an important bearing upon the process of fattening. 

 The subject of this investigation was one of the most impoverished-looking Oysters which it has 

 ever been my fortune to find. It was collected on the 20th of July this present year (1882) and 

 placed in a chromic acid solution of one per cent for forty-eight hours, when it was washed and 

 finally transferred to alcohol, to be cut into sections when convenient. This I have recently done* 

 When the specimen in question was fresh it was characterized by the almost perfect transpar- 

 ency of the mantle, and, as it afterwards turned out. the total atrophy of the generative organ. 

 Before the hardening process had been undergone, the mantle was greatly distended by watery 

 fluid, so much so that, after hardening, it had shrunken to about one-tenth of its bulk while m 

 the fresh and living state. The hardened specimen was cut into thin sections after imbedding in 

 paraffine, by means of a modification of the Taylor freezing microtome; the sections for thinness 

 left nothing to be desired, and revealed a condition of things different from any previously 

 observed by the writer in sections of either native or foreign Oysters. A careful microscopic 

 scrutiny showed that nowhere in the section was there a trace of even a rudiment of the genera- 

 tive network described as the atrophied condition in a previous portion of this paper. Not even 



