TWELFTH ANNUAL MEETING. 35 
sands, and the old methods of hand-picking were soon found to 
be impracticable. 
In all the forms of apparatus for bulk-hatching, no adequate 
means is employed for the separation of the dead eggs from the 
living. All, as they come from the fish, the unimpregnated as 
well as impregnated, are placed in the apparatus and remain 
together. 
In the case of the whitefish, and more especially in the case of 
shad eggs (which run through their period of incubation in a 
much shorter time), fungus rapidly develops among the dead 
eggs, communicating itself to the living, and large numbers of 
them, which would otherwise reach the period of hatching, are 
destroyed. The percentage of loss produced in this way is 
always considerable. and in many cases none of the eggs under- 
going incubation are saved. The attention of fish-culturists was 
early directed to the serious losses thus arising, and various ex- 
periments have been made with a view of effecting the separation 
of the dead from the living eggs. 
In 1878 Mr. F. N. Clark, the superintendent of the United Sistas 
Hatchery at Northville, Mich., attempted to effect the separation 
by introducing a gate into one side of the Bell and Mather cone, 
through which the shells and fish and dead eggs might go out 
into appropriate receptacles. This device, so far as it served for 
the collection of the young fish, was quite successful; but it was 
not found capable of doing the work for which it was first 
planned by Mr. Clark, and was abandoned. Similar experiments, 
looking to the same result, were made by him with the Chase 
jar—the form of apparatus employed for the whitefish work at 
the Northville Station. The result of these experiments, how- 
ever, led Mr. Clark to the conclusion that an automatic or self- 
picking arrangement for effecting the complete separation of the 
dead from the live eggs was not practicable, and a paper to that 
effect was written and published by him in Vol. I., Bulletin of 
the United States Fish Commission (1881, p. 62). The present 
method employed by him for the separation of the dead white- 
fish-eggs is to siphon off the dead eggs and such live eggs as are 
necessarily drawn over with them, and to transfer them to what 
