American Fisheries Society. 243 
y 
observations that have been made during the past few years and 
let you draw your own conclusions, or a discussion may follow 
that will clear the matter up more to your satisfaction. 
Up to last spring I think that we were seeking, at least to a 
great extent, in the wrong direction for the solution of the ques- 
tion of what caused so large a per cent of poor eggs, and were 
putting nearly the entire blame upon the spawners, and every 
time a poor lot of eggs came in we would write to the field fore- 
man telling him that such and such a man was sending in poor 
eges, and instruct the field foreman to jack him up about it, the 
men always protesting that they were doing the best that they 
could, and as the same men were employed for the whitefish 
work in the fall, and usually sent in eggs of an excellent quality, 
I could not bring myself to believe that they would do good work 
in the fall and intentionally do poor work in the spring, so I 
commenced looking in other directions for the cause of the in- 
ferior quality of the Pike-perch eggs. 
In the spring of 1904, I was directed to take six millions of 
Pike-perch eggs to the St. Louis exposition. ‘These eggs were 
some of the very last eggs received at the station, and usually the 
last eggs taken are of a poorer quality than those taken earlier. 
However, these eggs were placed in the common field cases and 
crushed ice packed in the space between the trays and the inside 
of the case, upon arrival at the exposition grounds about thirty 
hours later the cases were opened and quite a quantity of ice was 
found in the cases, the temperature of the eggs being about 47 
degrees. The eggs were taken out and allowed to stand until 
their temperature rose to nearly that of the water in which they 
were to be hatched, which was 62. The eggs were then placed in 
the jars and at the end of four days were nicely eyed, fully 65 
per cent of them eyeing, while the eggs left at the station, col- 
lected on the same day as those taken to St. Louis, were twelve 
days in eyeing and the average hatch but 48 per cent. These 
results were so marked as to lead us to commence a research 
along the lines of temperature. 
We first compared the record for the past five years at this 
station, taking the average water temperature during the period 
of incubation, and the per cent of eggs hatched, the results of 
this comparison are given as follows: 
