ELEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 83 
of two or three degrees willsend them off. The California sal- 
mon spawns when our waters are warm. Its own waters are 
warm also, and it is seeking colder ones, which it finds on the 
Pacific coast but not on the Atlantic. On our coast it lives in a 
temperature of sixty, and when it seeks to enter rivers it finds 
them up to eighty, and therefore they will not goin. They find 
no suitable waters to spawn in on our coast. 
Dr. Hupson.—We have put 300,000 California salmon fry 
in the Merrimac River. They were ready for distribution in 
January. We afterward found hundreds of them three inches in 
length. They went down, and we have not seen them since. 
This shows that they found food and grew, but whether they fail 
to find food at sea or not, or if they do not find suitable waters 
for spawning, I don’t know, but incline to think that Col. 
McDonald is correct. 
Mr. WiLmor.—I may be laughed at for the statement, but will 
say that the Californian salmon may possibly become Atlantic 
salmon, and that I have always thought so, and that the Eastern 
salmon taken West would become the Californian salmon. 
Mr. Evarts.—I agree with Mr. Wilmot. The salmon will 
change its color and the color of its flesh. 
Mr. Maruer.—It is impossible. Of course food and water 
will change color, but the quinnat or Californian salmon isa 
different fish, has a different structure, the most marked of which 
is more rays in the anal fin, at least six or seven more. And 
food and water would not change this in fifty generations of 
them unless hybridized. They are as different as our brook and 
lake trouts, which retain their distinct peculiarities in the same 
lake for years. The differences are not merely in color but in 
structure, as shown in the skeletons. Any one can see it in the 
teeth of the two trouts. Color counts for but very little in 
ichthyology, and a quinnat salmon differs from the S. salar as 
much as the horse and the ass. 
Mr. Biackrorp.—There is no doubt of that. A Californian 
salmon could not change so as to be mistaken for an Atlantic 
one by an expert. 
