192 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF 



beds of the fish, a process abandoned by most fish breeders, but in vogue to-day 

 at one of the largest hatching stations of the United States Fish Commission. Jacobi 

 did not make his discovery known until 1763 when his methods were published in a 

 Hanoverian Magazine. The next year his discovery was endorsed by German 

 naturalists; his memoir was published in Paris in 1770; he was recognized by George 

 III. of England, in 1 7 7 1 , who granted him a life pension for his discovery; his memoir 

 was translated into English in London in 1 788, and there can be no doubt regarding 

 the title that has been given him as the first to discover and carry into practical 

 usefulness the art of fish culture. 



John Shaw was the first to artificially fecundate the eggs of salmon in Great 

 Britain, in the year 1837, and Dr. Theodatus Garlick was the father of fish culture in 

 America. Garlick read of the experiments of Gehin and Remy in France, in 1842, 

 which were simply modeled after Jacobi's methods, and in 1853 he impregnated the 

 eggs of trout and hatched them in January, 1854. Public fish culture in the United 

 States did not follow until 1856, when the General Court of Massachusetts appointed 

 three Commissioners "to ascertain such facts respecting the artificial propagation of 

 fish as may tend to show the practicability and expediency of introducing the same 

 into the Commonwealth under the protection of law." The same year, Mr. V. P. 

 Vrasski, a Russian fish culturist, discovered the method of dry impregnation, a 

 method which nearly doubled the impregnation of eggs taken artificially. Before 

 this time the eggs and milt of trout had been taken in a vessel of water with the 

 idea of adhering as nearly as possible to natural processes. 



Down to 1854, all fish-cultural experiments had been conducted with eggs of the 

 Salmon family, chiefly trout, Salmo fario in Europe, and Salvelinus fontitialis in 

 America. Vrasski attempted to propagate the eel artificially, as well as the trout, in 

 the year 1854. In 1857, the eggs of the whitefish from Lake Ontario, Coregonns 

 clupeiformis, were impregnated, and an attempt was made the same year to propagate 

 the pike-perch, Siizostedion vitreum. Both experiments were made by Carl M tiller, 

 of New York, and Henry Brown, of New Haven, Conn. All the salmon family 

 experimented with up to this date were fall spawning fishes, which fishes spawn on a 

 falling temperature, but the pike-perch is a spring spawner and spawns on a rising 

 temperature. Consequently the pike-perch was the first of the spring spawning fishes 

 attempted to be hatched by artificial means, but it could not have been very 

 successful as will be shown later in this article. 



The first attempt to introduce salmon into Australia was made in 1862, by Mr. 

 H. R. Francis, of England. The eggs sent from England to Tasmania were a failure; 

 not so those sent in 1864 and afterward. The first attempt to breed salmon in 

 America was made in 1864. The eggs were obtained in Europe and hatched in a 



