170 Modern Pishculture in Fresh and Salt Water. 



for it. At the last haul at night, on the Hudson, we 

 often got a lot of spawning shad, but no males ; the net 

 would have a lot of ripe alewives, and it was a question 

 whether it was not better to fertilize the eggs than to 

 throw them away. The bastards would be eatable, and 

 so, on that ground, the hybridizing was done. The 

 eggs hatched, but I never say an adult fish which I 

 thought to be the result of this cross, and I worked the 

 Hudson many years. 



The fishermen learned of this, and when they caught 

 a mattowaca, as the Indians called it, the "tailor her- 

 ring" (Clupea mediocris) , which was in the Hudson 

 centuries before they were born, they named it "Rebel 

 Shad," as they first noticed it shortly after the Civil 

 War. 



SHAD AND STRIPED BASS. 



Green claimed to have crossed the shad with the 

 striped bass, and the Hon. Robert B. Roosevelt, then 

 (1879) President of the New York Fish Commission, 

 wrote a long article on the subject for the New York 

 "Tribune," dated October 3, 1879. To many persons 

 a fish is merely a fish, and they would see nothing 

 strange in crossing one kind on another; but fishes 

 differ in structure as mammals do, and the man who 

 should claim that he had crossed the dog and the cat, 

 the horse and the cow, or the sheep and the goat, would 

 be laughed at. Animals must be nearly related to inter- 

 breed, and when you cross the horse and the ass you 

 get a mule, an infertile hybrid. The dog and the wolf 

 may have issue, but the dog and the fox will not, al- 

 though a case or two has been reported. 



The shad with its soft fins and serrated abdomen 



