64 FISH CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
has wonderfully broadened. We are not now bound within the 
comparative narrow limits of a stream to grow our fishes. Our 
pond has widened out until it has become almost an ocean, or if 
not an ocean, any long expanse of sea coast on which the sea | 
breaks. What has been the great progress in these last two or 
three years has been made in the direction of the propagation 
of sea fish, and it is in this direction that the United States Fish 
Commission is advancing, and it is to this that the attention of 
the members of this association is called. We began with the 
ornamental, we have come down, or come up to the absolutely 
practical, unornate but useful. From what so many of our 
good and intelligent newspaper friends will insist on calling 
“speckled beauties,” we must now come to the descriptive of 
the commonplace cod. We want the handsomest flowers in the 
fish bouquet—to use a doubtful metaphor—but we mu t not for- 
get those other vegetables, the potatoes and the turnips. From 
the horticulturists we may derive both pleasure to the eye and 
sometimes to the taste, and even the humble kitchen gardener 
may ljearn a lesson from him. It is these trout, a handsome 
show of which Mr. Blackford will present to-morrow, which has 
made us proficient, as I have been endeavoring to explain, in 
other larger and better ways. 
If then I were to tell you that I believe, from something like 
an actual count, errors excepted, that last year 49,442,900 pounds 
of fresh fish of all kinds were received in New York, worth $3, 
339,827, and that these represented 55,373,862 individual fish— 
halibut of 150 pounds, or smelt, eight going to a pound, being 
all counted. Let us hope that by fish culture our children may 
see these numbers very greatly increased, not only by the intro- 
duction of new fishes, which stupid prejudice now turns away 
from, but by the actual propagation of more fish. 
Mr. Blackford called attention to a few viviparous perch from 
California, sent by Mr. B. B. Redding. They were examined 
and two were opened but the insides were too decomposed to 
trace the presence of young. 
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