3 
•complishing much of purely scientific value, although I did 
expect to obtain some information as to the time and condi- 
tions of spawning, and other questions of economic interest. 
My uncertainty of success was increased by the total failure 
•of an attempt which I had made the summer before. 
All the published papers upon the subject state that the 
-eggs are fertilized inside the body of the parent, and that the 
young are carried inside the parent shell until they are quite 
w T ell advanced in development, and provided with shells of 
their own ; that they swim about after they are discharged 
from the parent until they find a place to attach themselves, 
but that they undergo no change of structure between the 
time "when they leave the parent and the time when they be- 
come fixed. Misled by these statements, which are not true 
with our species, I opened numbers of oysters during the 
summer of 1878, and carefully examined the contents of the 
gills and mantle chambers, but found no young oysters. I 
•concluded that the time during which the young are carried 
*by the parent must be so short that I had missed it, and I en- 
tered upon the work this season with the determination to 
examine adult oysters every day, through the breeding season, 
in search of young, and at the same time to try to raise the 
young for myself by artificially fertilizing the eggs after I had 
removed them from the body of the parent. 
I met with complete success with the second method from the 
beginning, and succeeded in raising countless millions of young 
•oysters, and in tracing them through all their stages of de- 
velopment until they had acquired all the characteristics 
which the European embryologists have described and figured 
in the young of the European oyster at the time it leaves its 
parent to become fixed for life. 
I reached Crisfield on the 19 th of May, and established my- 
self about three miles from the town and about half a mile 
from Pokamoke Sound, and on Monday, the 21st, I opened a 
dozen fresh oysters, and found three females with their ovaries 
filled with ripe ova, and one male with ripe spermatoza. 
I mixed the contents of the reproductive organs of these 
:four oysters, and within two hours after the commencement 
