food for the young tish ; althousrh the water was seemingly in every 

 way adapted to the wants oF the fish, being similar to that of the 

 great lakes and in extent sufficient, with ample depth, etc. Mr. 

 Fairbank, at a meeting of tlie American Fi.-.heries Society, made a 

 statement as to his experiment, and we give it herewith. As such 

 costly experiments are rare, the gentleman having expended about 

 $15/ 00 ill the work, we have no doubt the benefit of such ^xp^ri- 

 ence will be appreciated : 



" Mr. President and gentlemen, I thought it might be of interest 

 "to s:iy a word or t\v>) to the gentlemen here in relation to the mat- 

 ter of planting tish in waters where they are not indigenous. We 

 have made very great strides in artificial propagation of fish, and 

 have mastered all the difficulties of hatching tish, pr')curin_' the 

 eggs, hatching and obtaining the young fry; and a great deal of 

 work and a great deal of money has been expended in planting fish 

 in various waters in all of the States. We started off with a degree 

 of enthusiasm eight or ten years ago that was worthy of a better 

 ■outcome than we have had, but it was done with more zeal than 

 wisdom, I think. We have planted shad, for instance, in the Calu- 

 met river here, which empties into Lake Michigan, and we have 

 planted trout in the Kankakee river and bro(jk trout in the streams 

 of Iowa, and lake salmon in all the little lakes in Michigan and 

 Illinois ; and wherever there was a little stream we thought at that 

 time all we had to do was to hatch the fish and put the young fry 

 in there, and we should have an abundance of fish. 



"[t is needless to say, at least I have not heard of ai y instance 

 where any of these efforts have been successful. I was anxious to 

 demonstrate the fact and I decided to make an experiment in Lake 

 Geneva, Wisconsin, which I did on a large enough scale to demon- 

 strate thoroughly whether it was practicable. Lake Geneva is a 

 lake about eight miles long and from half a mile to three miles wide. 

 [t is a very pure body of water as blue as Lake .Michigan. It is 185 

 ieet deep I have found in some places, but it averages 100 feet 

 deep all over; bold shores and very clean. 



'/There is not a bulrush or lilly pad in the Like, and in every way it 

 is particularly adapted to the salmon trout because it seemed in all 

 its characteristics just like the smull lakes of New York State in 

 which the salmon trout are indigeneous — Canandaigua Lake, Cayuga 

 Lake and several of the lakes there. Not feeling sure about it I 

 wrote to Mr. Seth Green, who was an old friend of mine, to come 

 out and spend a week with me, which he did. bec.mse 

 I wanted his judgment in the matter, and we sounded * the 

 lake and four.d the depth of the water and we dredged the bottom. 

 We caught all the small varieties of fish to see what food there 

 was for the salmon trout. Lake Geneva is somewhat celebrated for 

 abounding in the small fish known as cisco. They are in that Jake 

 and one or two other small lakes in Wisconsin, and they are there 

 in great abundance, living in deep water. The cisco is the natural 

 food of the lake trout, and we therefore very naturally came to the 

 conclusion that Lake Geneva was particularly ailapted, if any lake 

 on the face of the earth was, for planting and growing the Mack- 

 in iw trout, or lake trout; so I built a hitching house and I em- 

 ployed one of Mr. Green's men, Mr. Welcher, who was afterwards 

 superintendent of the Wisconsin fish hatching establishment, and 



