59 
best results from feeding with live food. To the latter 
theme I will devote this paper 
In a paper read before thissociety last year, Mr. Page 
admonished us that we were allowing European fish- 
culturists to lead us in this most important branch of 
the art This is unquestionably the fact, but I think 
we need not to hang our heads with shame on that 
account. The present stock of knowledge in this de- 
partment and the most advanced achievments have been 
a natural outgrowth from experience in pond-culture, 
an industry hardly yet known in America, but one that 
dates back hundreds of years in Europe, and is followed 
in some districts on a very large scale. In Bohemia - 
and Silesia there are fish-farms with hundreds of acres of 
water. At Wittingau, in Bohemia, a single fishculturist, 
Mr. Joseph Susta, has charge of ponds covering 
15,000 acres, a considerable portion of which can be 
periodically drainedand flowed. ‘These great fish-farms 
were in existence and profitably conducted after a well- 
established routine many generations before the so-called 
artificial fishculture had its birth. It was, moreover, a 
live-food method, though hardly known to be such, 
even by its practitioners. The introduction of artificial] 
propagation of salmonidae and other fishes, and the 
general dissemination of interest in the scientific study 
of animal life during the last 53 years has reacted on the 
fisneulturists, » andj, quickened their | faculties!) of 
observation, and they have recently made some 
important discoveries. 
One of the most important of these discoveries, made 
by Mr. Susta of Wittingau, relates to the character of 
the food of fishes, especially the carp. It used to be 
held as a dogma that the carp fed mainly on vegetable 
matters Even as’ late asv0s63, Raphael Molin, the 
author of a work of some reputation on “The Rational 
Culture of Freshwater Fishes,” gave this account of the 
food of the carp : ‘““The carp delights in quiet water with 

