THE GERMAN CARP IN THE UNITED STATES. 623 
account of their scarcity, the market value has:risen to a point making 
_ their sale profitable. The terms permanent and temporary are thus 
used here, as it will be observed, not in the sense of the time of dura- 
tion of the ponds, but as denoting the manner in which they are used. 
The latter sort correspond more or less closely in their function to 
the stock ponds on a well-equipped German carp farm. Either sort 
may be natural! or artificial. 
PERMANENT PONDS. 
Witha few possible exceptions carp culture has never been attempted 
in this country after the lines on which it is carried on so extensively 
in Germany. Most of those persons throughout the United States 
who aspired to carp culture at the time these fish were being dis- 
tributed by the Government merely dumped the fish into any body of 
water that was convenient, or into any pond that could be hastily 
scraped out or constructed by damming some small stream, and there- 
after left them to shift for themselves, possibly feeding them occa- 
sionally at first. That such efforts were not a success is no more to 
be wondered at than would be a man’s failure if he attempted to estab- 
lish a successful poultry farm merely by turning a few dozen fowls 
loose in the neighborhood of his home. Whether extensive and prop- 
erly conducted carp farms would then, or would now, be profitable 
-and pay a reasonable return on the capital and labor invested, is 
another niatter, and will be considered a little farther on. 
It is not proposed here to enter into an elaborate description of the 
methods employed by the successful European carp culturist. Ameri- 
ean readers who may be interested in the subject are referred to the 
excellent paper by Hessel (1881), which has been cited frequently 
throughout this report, and to the fuller account given in the transla- 
tion published by the United States Fish Commission of the work by 
Nicklas (1886). Numerous works on the subject have been published 
in German, and references to them will be found in the bulletins 
named above; among the more recent books may be mentioned those 
by Susta (1888) and Knauthe (1901). 
Some idea of the extent to which carp culture is practiced in Ger- 
many and the neighboring parts of Europe may be gained from the 
following extract quoted from Hessel (1881, p. 866): 
A celebrated establishment for carp-culture, with large, extensive ponds, was 
located, as early as the fourteenth century, near the town of Wittingau, in Bohemia, 
Austria. The first beginning of it may be traced back to the year 1367. At that 
time the lords of Rosenberg called into existence and maintained for centuries these 
establishments on a scale so extensive that to this day they are the admiration of the 
visitor, the main parts having survived, while the race of the Rosenbergs has long 
been extinct. 
The manor of Wittingau suffered greatly from the calamities of the Thirty Years’ 
War, and with it, in consequence, its fish-culture. The latter only recovered the 
