120 Thirty-Third Annual Meeting 
resources are neglected, frogs have no market value and are 
never used except as delicacies for sick children. On thinking 
about this matter, however, it has occurred to me that perhaps 
the frogs are much more valuable as destroyers of insects injuri- 
ous to the rice plant than they would be as food. In the rice 
ditches and reservoirs, carp are very extensively grown, and vari- 
ous small fishes also occur and are caught with scoop nets or 
short seines. 
The cultivation of water products has gone hand in hand 
with the development of the fisheries, and in certain lines has 
attained greater perfection and extent than in any other coun- 
try. The culture of terrapin, which with us is an unsolved prob- 
lem and has only recently been seriously approached, has been 
very successfully carried on for years by the Japanese. I visited 
a terrapin farm near ‘Tokyo where 40,000 young were hatched 
last year and 10,000 large terrapins were reared and sold at an 
average price of 40 cents a pound. The Japanese oysters are of 
excellent quality, and are extensively and ingeniously cultivated, 
as shown in a special report recently issued by the Bureau of 
Fisheries. The artificial propagation of food-fishes is not as yet 
important and is practically restricted to salmon in the island 
of Hokkaido and to carp in all sections. 
The fish whose cultivation engages more people than any 
other species is the gold fish. The attention given to this species 
illustrates one of the characteristic racial features of the Jap- 
namely, the love for the purely beautiful or ornamental 
which pervades all classes, and the time and money they bestow 
on things that appeal to the esthetic rather than to the mer- 
cenary and practical, notwithstanding a large part of the popu- 
lation is and always has been pitifully poor in this world’s goods. 
The demand for gold-fish appears to be without limit, and every 
year the output shows a substantial increase. Many thousand 
people make a livelihood by growing gold-fish for market, and 
hundreds of peddlers carry the fish through the streets and along 
the roads in wooden tubs suspended from a shoulder-bar. ‘The 
leading gold-fish center is Koriyama, not far from the ancient 
capital city of Nara. Here are 350 independent breeding estab- 
lishments, whose yearly output runs far up into the millions. 
One farm at which I spent some time was started 140 years ago, 
anese 

