470 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



Being aquatic animals, it is considered sufficient if they are abun- 

 dantly supplied with water, which is not the case. It is a well 

 known fact that they breathe throughout their whole surface, and 

 change their skins once a wcekj their bodies are covered with a 

 mucilaginous substance similar to the eel, which enables them to 

 move through the water with ease and celerity, besides preserv- 

 ing an serial stratum near their respiring surface. When this 

 matter is present in excess it kills them. They crawl over some 

 resisting substance in their native element and rub it off; but 

 when confined in water alone they are unable to denude them- 

 selves, and consequently die in large numbers. If you would 

 preserve them for a long period, furnish them w^ater, with moss, 

 gravel, &c., and change it once a week in winter and twice in 

 summer. As parasitic animals attack and destroy them, they 

 must be carefully watched. To enable you to judge what im- 

 mense numbers are used by the medical profession, it is only 

 necessary to state that nine millions are imported into Loudon 

 annually, by only five dealers. Two years since, I sent a raw 

 Irishman into a leech pond to remove some wallow limbs that 

 had fallen, and Avhen he came out his bare legs were bleeding 

 profusely from the bites of some thirty leeches that had attached 

 themselves thereto. The man never having seen a creature of 

 the kind before, ran a mile and a half to his fellows, screaming 

 the while that he would blead to death. 



Permit me to inform the Club that it is possible to stock every 

 stream in the State of New- York with all the desirable varieties 

 offish in a single season, and all the waters in the United States 

 that can be reached by railroad in a single year. Breeding ponds 

 might be arranged along the Erie canal at a trifling expense, in 

 which billions of salmon and other fine fish could be artificially 

 raised and prepared for the purpose, then turned into the canal 

 to distribute themselves. I have exercised all the mind I pos- 

 sessed, in a private manner, for the last ten years, to stimulate 

 naturalists, physiologists and agriculturists to fish manufacturing, 

 without the least sticcess, and finally oifered the State to accom- 

 plish the object at my own expense; stating that fish as an article 

 of diet abounded in nutritive qualities, and to increase its abun- 



