TWELFTH ANNUAL MEETING. 51 
from the neighborhood of Sandy Hook, as I should need in my 
experiments. Thus equipped I began work early in July, and 
was able before I left the city to present to the gaze of those 
interested in this class of bivalves, young oysters which had 
been kept alive for fourteen days, and were at that time appar- 
ently strong and healthy. Unfortunately I was obliged to leave 
the city at this stage of the experiments, and thus they were 
brought abruptly to an end sooner than desirable, but not with- 
out demonstrating that the process on a small scale was at least 
partially successful. In arranging my apparatus I had in view 
two things: first, the necessity of a nearly constant flow of 
water and, so far as possible, water that had not been previously 
used; and, second, of such an interchange that the entire mass 
of water in the vessel should be set in motion a number of times 
during the day. The first was the more difficult of accomplish- 
ment, since, in order to get a flow of the water, an outlet to the 
vessel was necessary, and any outlet, however guarded by 
screens, was liable to allow the escape of the young during the 
free-swimming stage, when, for the most part, they congregate 
at the surface of the water. To obviate some of the difficulty, I 
concluded that it was necessary during the earlier periods, at 
least, to draw the water from the bottom of the vessel, and in 
order that the flow from the vessel should be steady and of a 
nature not to permit of the escape of the young, I determined to 
employ capillary attraction as exhibited in the fibres of various 
cloths when immersed in liquids. For the first week, I was em- 
ployed principally in experimenting with various kinds of cloths, 
as ‘to their capacity for transferring water from one vessel to 
another, their continuous action and the effect of the sea water 
upon the coloring-matier and the coloring-matter upon the sea 
water. | 
Some of the fabrics employed did not allow of sufficient water 
‘to pass through them, or in other words the capillary action was 
not strong enough; others were too coarse and were liable to 
allow the young oysters to become entangled in the meshes, and 
remain there as in acage, or be carried over and out of the ves- 
sel in the outflowing current, while others lost a portion of their 
coloring material and thus discolored the water, and while I 
