ELEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 65 
Whatever may be the form of the apparatus which will finally 
be used in artificial oyster culture, it will also be necessary to 
provide some sort of cheap and effective method to favor the at- 
tachment of the young fry, in the shape of some substance or 
objects which may be transferred to nurseries or cages in open 
water where it is to undergo further development. Clean peb- 
ples at once suggest themselves as a cheap material, which can 
be graded to the right size through screens of the proper mesh. 
What is most suitable, however, will have to be learned by ex- 
periment. 
The special merit of the proposed method of artificial culture 
from the egg upward, would be that we could probably do with- 
out the cumbrous tiles, slates, etc., covered with mortar, used as 
cultch to a large extent in France. In fact, if collectors are to 
be used at all after the French mode, it would appear to the 
writer that it would be just as well to use old oyster shells and 
the cheapest possible materials strewn over arable bottoms near 
productive spawning oyster beds, as is pretty extensively prac- 
ticed on the coast of New England, especially Connecticut, and 
to some extent in places on the Chesapeake Bay. If any con- 
siderable advance is to be made in the culture of the oyster, this 
much is certain, that it is to be attained by a radical departure 
from the older methods, some of which have been in use for 
over ten centuries. The older methods are universally cum- 
brous, involving large outlays of labor in their practice, which 
is a serious item in their practical working in the United States, 
where labor is much more expensive than in continental coun- 
tries. Not only is this objection valid, but a still more serious 
one is the uncertainty of the “set” of spat which may catch on 
any sort of natural or artificial cultch. In some seasons the col- 
lectors will be overcrowded, in others no spat will be found to 
adhere. 
The same element of risk is encountered in theuse of old oys- 
ter shells as cultch for the spat, and, as I have been told by 
oystermen, several thousands of dollars’ worth of shells may be 
strewn upon good oyster bottom on which not a single spat will 
be found to adhere, thus involving a loss of both material and 
labor. I do not see that any method in which tiles or mortar- 
