64 COMMERCIAL FISH CULTURE. 



gusting food which they obtained at the mouth of a common 

 sewer. 



The modem phase of pisciculture is entirely a commercial 

 one, which as yet does not lie in imparting fanciful flavours to 

 fish, but has developed itself both at home and abroad in the 

 replenishing of exhausted streams with salmon, trout, or other 

 kinds of fish. The present idea of pisciculture,* as a branch of 

 commerce, is due to the shrewdness of a simple French peasant, 

 who gained his livelihood as a pScheur in the tributaxies of the 

 Moselle, and the other streams of his native district, La Bresse 

 in the Vosges. He was a thinking man, although a poor one, 

 and it had long puzzled him to understand how animals yield- 

 ing such an abundant supply of eggs should, by any amount of 

 fishing, ever become scarce. He knew very well that all female 

 fish were provided with tens of thousands of eggs, and he could 

 not weU see how, in the face of this fact, the rivers of La Bresse 

 should be so scantily peopled with the finny tribes. Nor was 

 the scarcity of fish confined to his own district : the rivers of 

 France generally had become impoverished ; and as in aU 

 Catholic countries fish is a prime necessary of life, the want of 

 course was greatly felt. Joseph Eemy was the man who first 

 found out what was wrong with the French streams, and 

 especially with the fish supplies of his native rivers — and, better 

 than that, he discovered a remedy. He ascertained that the 

 scarcity of fish was chiefly caused by the immense number of 

 eggs that never came to life, the enormous quantity of young 

 fish that were destroyed by enemies of one kind or another, and 

 the fishing-up of all that was left, in many instances, before they 

 had an opportunity to reproduce themselves ; at any rate, with- 

 out any care being taken to leave a sufScient breeding stock in 

 the rivers, so that the result he discovered had become inevitable. 



The guiding fact of pisciculture has been more than once 

 accidentally re-discovered — that is, allowing that the -ancient 

 Romans knew it exafctly as now practised ; but nothing came of 

 such discoveries, and till a discovery be turned to some practical 

 use, it is, in a sense, no discovery at all. After being lost for 

 many hundred years, the art of artificially spawning fish was 

 re-discovered in Germany by one Jacobi, and practised on some 

 trout more than a century ago. This gentleman not only 

 practised pisciculture himself, but wrote essays on the subject 

 as well. His elaborate treatise on the art of fish-culture was 

 written in the German language, but also translated into Latin, 



