56 CONFERENCE OF GOVERNORS. 



Bay View, N. S., 1891-1906, . . 1,889,300,000 



Canso, N. S., 1905-1906, . 79,000,000 



Shemogue, N. B., 1903-1906, 291,000,000 



Shippegan, N. B., 1904-1906, 220,000,000 



Charlottetown and Dunk R., P. E. I., 1880-1906, . 256,085,000 



2,735,385,000 



Again, allowing the maximum rate of 1 in 5,000, this product 

 of the activity of twenty-four years^ would yield only 547,077 

 lobsters, or but little over the two-hundredth part of the numbers 

 caught in certain years in Canada alone. 



Such illustrations should make us pause to consider whether we 

 have rightly evaluated the egg and the young in this animal. They 

 show the hopelessness of restoring or of even maintaining this 

 fishery by such a method when conducted on any possible scale. 



In cases of this kind it is as detrimental to overestimate the 

 value of the egg as to undervalue it. The eggs are true gold, 

 although the amount which each weighs is infinitesimal. Like 

 drops of water and grains of sand, these eggs count for but little 

 singly, but in mass the inanimate particles can make the oceans 

 and the continents, while the living germs can fill them with teem- 

 ing inhabitants. 



We cannot work on the colossal scale of nature in dealing with 

 egg or larva, but we may frustrate nature by destroying the egg 

 producers. Nature long ago provided for the cod, the shark and 

 hundreds of other predaceous fishes; she took into account the 

 tides, the storm and the rock-ribbed coast also, by giviag to this 

 race billions of eggs each year; but no provision was made for 

 millions of traps working night and day at the bottom of the 

 sea to destroy the producers of these eggs. 



The method of rearing the young through their critical larval 

 or pelagic period, until they finally go to the bottom in the fourth 

 or fifth stages, promises to materially aid this fishery. Some 

 efforts were made in this direction by MM. Guillon and Coste- at 

 Concarneau, France, as early as 1865, when the necessity of rear- 

 ing the little lobster through its dangerous period of infancy 

 was as clearly understood as now; but, though heralded with 

 enthusiastic reports, little real advance seems to have been made. 



In the years 1873 to 1875 experiments in the hatching and 



' No hatchery operations apparently having been conducted in the years 1888 to 1890, 

 inclusive. 



2 Mooquin-Tandon, O., and Soubeiran, J. L. . " E'tablissements du Pisciculture de Con- 

 carneau et de Port-de-Bonc." Bull, de la Soc. d'AocIimatation, 2d. S^r. T. 11. Paris, 

 1865. 



