102 Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting. 
per cent. In case of disease we separate the fish right away, 
and throw salt in the pond. 
Food and the condition of the pond are the important factors. 
Get as close to nature as possible. That is my belief and ex- 
perience. 
Mr. Whish: I notice one of the speakers said his fish devel- 
oped ulcers. Apparently the disease which cleaned out the great 
Cold Spring hatchery has been abroad. I have read the reports 
of the society and of the United States Fish Commission care- 
fully, and do not remember seeing anything about it. Now this 
boil disease is a fearful, deadly thing. Dr. Marsh will tell you 
that he went to our Cold Spring Harbor hatchery and gave his 
best skill to it. He told us to do some things, which we did. 
In fact we did more than he told us. We cleaned out every one 
of those old stone ponds and wooden ponds and put in nice clean 
cement ponds, and brought down from the Adirondack region 
several thousand fingerlings, wild brook trout, and put them in 
there a year ago. He says that the water is all right, and you 
would think so yourselves, if you saw it. It is as nice looking 
water as vou ever saw, — ever so much better looking than what 
you have out here at White Sulphur Springs. It is clean, cold 
water, so far as outward appearances goes. Everything went 
along nicely down there up to the first of May. Then the brook 
trout were 15 months old or more, and they began to die just 
as fast as the others died a year ago; just as others died 9 years 
ago; just exactly as they are dying to-day. They have what is 
apparently a series of boils develop on them. ‘These boils burst 
just as they would on a human being if let alone, and they con- 
tain the same bloody serum found in boils in human beings. 
The fish died at the rate of 709 a day in the Long Island 
hatchery; and to-day that hatchery has nothing in it except a 
few fingerlings raised from eggs, brought from Massachusetts. 
That deprived New York of a supply of 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 
of brook trout eggs yearly, and I do not know where we can make 
it good. 
These are the plain facts about the situation in New York 
state, and other states will experience the plague later, if they 
have not already done so. 
