THE NEW AKT OF BREEDING FISH. 27 



from blazoning to the world what those meritorioils 

 writers may have said about artificial fecundation, 

 our savants should rather have been careful to keep 

 their facts out of view ; for if we admit them, they 

 only go to prove that these authors having commu- 

 nicated to the academies their knowledge of artificial 

 fecundation, those learned bodies could not put to- 

 gether three simple ideas ; fecundation, artificial 

 hatching, and propagation, and draw from them, for 

 the interests of humanity, the natural results which 

 must strike the sense of any intelligent person ; and 

 that it needed two simple fishermen to vivify their 

 ideas and spread them before the world. 



How, then, can this embryo thrown a hundred 

 years ago into the domain of science, and which up 

 to this day has never been able to pierce the dust 

 that envelopes it, be compared with the living idea 

 of Grehin and Eemy ? an idea which from the begin- 

 ning Spain and Holland have sought to carry oif 

 from France ; an idea, the consequences of which 

 will soon fill, according to their needs, all the streams 

 of the world ? What, indeed, is this sterile, useless 

 egg, in presence of the millions of fish we can already 

 enumerate, after these few years of almost unaided 

 experiment ! 



We bring this sketch to a close by a single re- 

 flection, but one sad enough : If humanity were in 

 the moon (if we may be pardoned the illustration), 

 and it were possible to estabhsh intercourse with 

 that orb, aU our intellectual and material treasures 



