112 Tit irtij-sc veil III Annual Meeting 



together a large enough numl)er to warrant continuing tlieir 

 propagation. Just at present the bureau is considering thi' ad- 

 visability of the entire abandonment of the propagation of tlie 

 striped bass at Weldon. I think we may continue another year 

 on the Pacific coast in hopes that we may do better work there. 

 When you speak of the output of eggs, I would say that Mr. 

 Lambson reported two and a half million which he hatched. 

 He took seven, eight or nine million, Init the rest were poor eggs. 

 Tliat nund)er is a mere bagatelle. One female bass will give 

 you as many as 2,000,000 eggs sometimes. So when you report 

 having taken after a season's efforts 15,000,000 eggs of the 

 striped bass, it is nothing at all ; it represents only half a dozen 

 fisli out of the whole river for a whole season's efforts. Tlie rest 

 have siiawned the natural way. 



^Ir. Chirk: 1 do not wish to rise here in the way of criti- 

 cism at all, l)ut I would advise this: If the bureau wishes to 

 pusli stri]ied l)ass work wlien they get the female bass when it 

 is not ready and the male is. let all efforts be bent on that pen- 

 ning. In tlie first place you get a quantity of fish — 



Air. (Mark: Oh, you don't — I thought you did. (Laugh- 

 ter.) You have got to get fisli, of course; Init when Mr. Chase 

 first connnenced penning whitefish on the Detroit river twenty- 

 five or thirty years ago, I said at first, you cannot do it, but he 

 did, but not with very good results till later on ; but at first they 

 met with the same difficulty until they got to building the crates 

 riglit : got them in proper place and the fish got the ])roper 

 amount of water. Even now we drive in stakes and l)uild a 

 little pen in tlie river and let the fish have the natural water. 

 I should want to try all those })lans for penning the fish. If 

 you get fish tliat are not ri]x% hold them and try all sorts of 

 ways ; because if you can get twenty-five or fifty fish and get 

 them in ripe condition, you will have a lot of eggs; and I 

 should not want to give the experiment up until I had used 

 every effort on the question of penning. We tried the shad un- 

 til every one was satisfied that we could not pen them, but there 

 were not merely hundreds of dollars spent on the ])enning 

 proposition with regard to the shad, liut thousands and thou- 

 sands of dollars and I helped spend it, and it was a failure. 



