THIRTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 13 
Mr. Biackrorp: I would like to hear Professor Ryder ex- 
press his views in regard to the eggs of the cod-fish. 
Prof. RypEr: My experience with cod-fish eggs, both at Ful- 
ton Market and at Wood’s Holl, has been quite considerable. 
Our greatest success in handling these,eggs has been in com- 
paratively salt water, as Colonel McDonald can testify. The 
eggs taken at Wood’s Holl were from fish that had been kept 
under the same conditions as those in Fulton Market. At the 
former place the eggs would float as they should normally, but 
at Fulton Market they-had no tendency to float as did the eggs 
from the more northern locality. I also observed that in most 
cases the eggs had an abnormal appearance. The vitellus 
was disorganized, and the vitelline matter and germinal 
material were pulled out of shape, The germinal disc was 
formed, but defectively; in many instances, after formation, it 
had been broken into irregular fragments, which were certainly 
not characteristic of normal segmentation. What the cause 
was I cannot say, but I believe that the confinement of parent 
female fishes of any species would have a tendency to interfere 
with the fertility of the ova. That has been the experience at 
Havre de Grace with the shad, and I should not be surprised if 
the confinement of female cod in the wells of the fishing smacks 
and the cars, would not tend to cause the eggs which were 
mature, and still contained in the ovaries, to become, to a cer- 
tain extent, disorganized, and therefore incapable of fertiliza- 
tion. My conclusions have been formed deliberately, although 
the data have been very imperfect. There was this important 
difference between the eggs taken at Wood’s Holl and Fulton 
Market. The latter exhibited a decided tendency to sink, which 
in our Wood’s Holl experiment we always associated with a 
condition indicating that such eggs would never hatch. We 
invariably noticed this to be the case, and concluded to accept 
it as prima-facie evidence that whenever a cod egg went to the 
bottom, that was the last of it, so far as its capacity for develop- 
ment was concerned. 
Mr. Maruer: I have observed that the cod-fish eggs which | 
have taken at Fulton Market, New York, had a tendency to sink, 
as just stated by Professor Ryder. When 1 removed them from 
