l899-'00 TRANSACl^IONS 171 



Government Hatchery. The latter have so prospered and grown 

 in size and numbers, that they are cleaning out the brook trout, 

 formerly so abundant in it. The Club who lease the lake are 

 anxious to exterminate the hordes of huge lake trout which are 

 the direct result of fry planted there from Grand Falls Hatchery, 

 and the use of nets has been resorted to, enabling some fine 

 specimens of these " fresh- water sharks" to be captured. 

 Deplorable as are the results from the Club's point of view, no 

 better testimony to the success of the government's hatchery 

 work could be adduced. 



To most people fish-culture is thought to consist in taking 

 some ripe mature fish, just before spawning, squeezing eggs from 

 them, fertilising them, and placing them in jars or on trays, in a 

 current of water until the young fish hatch out. Fish-culture is, 

 however, much more than that, it includes at least half-a-dozen 

 different methods. Of course, one method, and that most 

 familiar, consists in obtaining ripe living fish of both sexes, and 

 after subjecting them to the same process of careful and gentle 

 pressure, mingling the two products in a spawning vessel or dish, 

 where the eggs are rapidly fecundated, and then transferring the 

 vivified eggs to the trays or hatching jars. The parent fish, be- 

 ing handled with care are returned to the water, with rare ex- 

 ceptions, alive and unharmed, and in the case of salmon visually 

 continue the ascent up-stream, which had been interrupted by 

 the hatchery officials. In B. C, it is said, the spawned fish 

 frequently descend, but this may depend upon the sex, for 

 Frank Buckland noticed that male salmon invariably bolt up- 

 stream if disturbed, whereas the " hens " or female salmon bolt 

 down stream. The fish do not die, as the signs of ripeness are 

 readily visible to the expert officer's eye, and ripe fish are spawn- 

 ed painlessly and with the utmost readiness and ease. It is a 

 curious fact that eggs from dead fish may be successfully used if 

 death is recent. Thus the distinguished Russian naturalist, 

 Owsiannikoff, in a paper' read in 1869, before the Imperial 

 Academy of St. Petersburg, stated that he had fertilised the eggs 

 taken from dead fishes, and in most cases with success. Different 

 species also may be crossed and hybrids readily produced but 

 there are limits to the process due, no doubt, to certain 

 microscopic peculiarities in the structure of the egg capsule. 



