THIRTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 159 
it is fully three times as much. Such a condition of affairs ap- 
pears bad enough ; but unless some such measures as I have 
suggested are undertaken matters will soon be worse. If the 
people are left to themselves, they will, in their ignorance, give 
us only another instance of exhausted beds and destroyed in- 
dustry. 
Unless they can be convinced of the folly of their present 
course we will have but a repetition in the Chesapeake of the 
experience in Long Island Sound. 
The natural oyster of marketable size will disappear, and only 
a small “seed” oyster will be left. The goose will be killed ; 
the golden eggs will be laid no more. And the vast fleet of 
pungies and canoes, and multitudes of men and women will 
have no employment beyond picking out the pin feathers of the 
inanimate carcass. 
In the examination of one of the largest beds in Pocomoke 
Sound, I found that the shells represented 97 of the product ; in 
other words, I had to get about fifty bushels of shells before I 
could get one bushel of oysters. 
Prof. RyprEer. I have listened to Dr. Hudson, Prof. Goode, 
and Lieut. Winslow with a great deal of interest, and it seems 
to me that all the data furnished in their papers point in the 
same direction, but I cannot but believe that artificial oyster- 
culture still holds out to us some little hope of success. I have 
lately read a recent paper by M. Bouchon-Brandely in which he 
makes the following remarkable statement : “It is to the French 
investigators that we are indebted for the first advances and ex- 
periments in artificial oyster-culture.” That includes, I presume, 
the development of the methods of artificial oyster-culture, or 
rather of artificial fertilization as applied to oyster-culture. And 
I take this occasion before the American Fish Cultural Asso- 
ciation to make a reclamation in favor of American investi- 
gators, and especially Prof. Brooks, of Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity, in whose footsteps I and several others have trodden, and 
particularly in our work along the Chesapeake bay. We have 
succeeded in confining the spawn of the American oyster in arti- 
