CONFERENCE OF GOVERNORS. 55 



We speak of the " living chain " from egg to adult, but the 

 metaphor is not a happy one. There is no " chain " relation in 

 living nature, only a succession of individuals, of individual eggs, 

 united in origin but discrete in each generation. The embryol- 

 ogist begins with the egg, but the fish culturist with the egg 

 producer. Spare the egg producer, then, and nature will save 

 the race. "We cannot wholly take the place of nature in dealing 

 with the eggs, but we can defeat the ends of nature by killing 

 the "bird" which lays them. 



But, do you say, " We have the egg lobster law, and the pro- 

 tection of lobsters in spawn should remedy our difficulties " ? In 

 reply, we have but to recall the fact that adults lay their eggs but 

 once in two years, and consequently we should not expect to find 

 more than one-half of this class with spawn attached to the body 

 at any given time. This at once reduces the protection aimed at 

 in the egg lobster law by one-half. The other half shrinks to 

 small proportions when we consider that there is an overlap of 

 four weeks in July between the climax of the periods of hatching 

 and spawning, when the majority of all adult female lobsters 

 are without eggs of any kind, and also when we further consider 

 the ease with which a fisherman by a few strokes of the hand can 

 make a berried lobster eggless. 



When analyzed in the light of the law of survival, the showing 

 of the lobster hatcheries is not very encouraging. The hatching 

 and immediate liberation of the fry has been practised for many 

 years in Europe, where experiments were made in Norway as 

 early as 1873, as well as in Canada and the United States. The 

 whole number of fry hatched and liberated on the Atlantic coast 

 for a period of ten years, according to official returns from the 

 hatcheries of the United States, Canada and Newfoundland, 

 reached a grand total of 4,214,778,300. Applying the law of sur- 

 vival, with life rate of 2 in 30,000, which has been shown to be a 

 fair allowance, this number of young would yield only 280,985, 

 while there must have been captured on this coast in the same 

 period nearly 1,000,000,000 lobsters. By applying the maximum 

 rate of 2 in 10,000, which we are assured is far too large, the 

 yield would be 842,955. To have held the fishery at an equilibrium 

 by this means, there should have been hatched 5,000,000,000,000 

 young, or 1,250 times as many as were actually liberated. 



To take another example, the total output of all the Canadian 

 lobster hatcheries, for the entire history of this fishery, 1880 

 to 1906, was as follows: — 



