88 THE NEW ART OF BREEDING FISH. 



are unknown by most other men even the best in- 

 formed, and it was not unnecessary to call public 

 attention- forcibly to this application of science to 

 rural industry, which not only had not profited by 

 the results of the discovery, but I think I can safely 

 affirm that there were then not ten agricultural au- 

 thors or teachers in all France who had the least 

 idea of the service which physiologists had so long 

 before rendered them. 



Under such circumstances we should not be as- 

 tonished to find in one of the most secluded valleys 

 of the chain of Vosges, two illiterate fishermen, but 

 endowed by nature with a rare spirit of observation 

 and a rarer perseverance, being ignorant of prior dis- 

 coveries, and wishing to find some remedy for the 

 decrease and threatened extinction of their trade, 

 employing several years of their time in laboriously 

 making over again the same experiments already 

 made by the physiologist I have cited, and in re-dis- 

 covering what naturalists had been acquainted with 

 for a century; 



But if these poor peasants of Bresse were pre- 

 ceded in their researches by scientific men, and if 

 they have not enriched natural history with fresh 

 discoveries, their labors are no less worthy of interest, 

 and they have a claim upon our consideration, for 

 they seem to have been the first among us to make 

 practical application of the discovery of artificial 

 fecundation to the rearing of the fish, and have thus 



