40 FISH CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
and before their labors became generally known, had succeeded in 
rearing to a marketable size several thousands .of trout. In 1843, 
Remy, in a letter to the Prefect of the Vosges, narrated the results of 
his experiments, and in the following year he and his colleague re- 
ceived a premium froma local society—the Society of Emulation of the 
Voges. ~ 
An immense stress has been laid upon the importance of these men 
to fish culture, particularly by French writers, Quatrefages, Haxo, 
Milne Edwards, Haim and others, an importance which I am, however, 
unable to appreciate to the same extent as they. In the first place, it 
seems somewhat improbable that the art of fertilizing fish eggs was, as 
is usually claimed, an original discovery of these men. Jacobi’s exper- 
iments had been published nearly eighty years, and in the French 
language, in various popular treatises on fish and fishery, for fully 
seventy years. Remy was not so thoroughly illiterate as is usually 
represented, or he could not have communicated his observations in 
writing to the provincial authorities, nor have become a candidate for 
an award from a scientific society. It seems quite unlikely that the 
names of Jacoby and Goldstein were to him entirely unfamiliar. Con- 
sider, too, that the reputed discovery of Dom Pinchon, in the fitteenth 
century, was made in the neighboring province of Cofe @’ Or, while in 
Haute Marne, the remotest portions of which are not thirty miles 
distant from Vosges, local experimenters, as early as 1820, “had suc- 
ceeded in hatching the eggs of the trout and obtaining their young to 
replenish the brooks and creeks of that district.” [MILLET: op. cit., 
p. 128.] 
Even the claim that the labors of the Vosges men were of immense 
importance to fish culture in France is not so clearly tenable. When 
the important essay of Quatrefages was published in 1848, their work — 
was unknown to its author, and to this essay all Frenchmen agree in 
ascribing great influence in stimulating their national efforts in fish 
culture. 
I hope it is not uncharitable to suggest that the chief significance to 
fish culture of the work of Remy and Gehin lies in the opportunity it 
afforded to France to throw its energies into the field without acknowl- 
edgment of indebtedness to Germany. At the same time I am not 
disposed to deprive their experts of the commendation which they 
deserve for their practical successes in fish breeding. The French 
Government, when in 1850, after resolving to make a grand experi- 
ment in stocking the waters of France with fish, seriously considered 
the question of giving to Remy and Gehin the direction of a portion 
of the enterprise as a recompense for the merit of having created a 
