81 
Yaphank, and flowing into Great South Bay near 
Bellport. We paid ten cents each for the fish and would 
get two orthree hundred smelts of different sizes and 
degrees of ripeness. 
In 1890 we only bought too fish, as we had an offer 
of all we wanted without cost from Mr. H. Scudder, of 
Northport, only seven miles distant. Next year, or six 
years after the first small planting, we found that the 
smelts were running up our stream in numbers to make 
it worth while to try to get eggs from it, and we did. 
This was the first proof that the little brook had been 
made a self-sustaining smelt stream, although we knew 
that a few fish had run up it in years before. The 
habit of the smelt to runup streams at night, and return 
to salt water before day, enables it to escape observation 
to a very great extent unless one is especially on the 
watch for its coming. The eggs are deposited on 
stones in the swift water, and never in the pools, where 
the flowisslower. They are hatched in bright sunshine, 
which will kill our eggs in the jars, and unless it may be 
a provision of nature to check the increase of this prolific 
fish by killing the eggs that chance to get the direct rays 
of the sun, and to have only those which lie on the 
shady side of stones come to life, I cannot understand 
why the sunlight is fatal in the jars. Perhaps we may 
solve this problem some day, but an inspection of the 
stones in the stream, where millions of eggs were laid 
this year, did not offer a solution to this question which, 
by the way, never came up until the hatching season 
was about half over. Next year we may observe the 
effect of thesun on the eggsin the stream more carefully; 
we know what it is in the jars. 
Our plantings in this little stream were: 
1885 - - - 100,000 fry. 
Fea =) =) - 2;,f0o,00odry. 
1887 - - - 2,000,000 fry. 
