THE SMELTS 
337 
He explained that the “foot” is a projection on the eggs, which is shaped like 
the stem and bottom of a wine glass and is the only point of adhesion that the egg 
of the smelt has, there being no glutinous coating around the egg of the smelt that 
will enable it to adhere at any point. So the breaking of the hold of the foot made 
it powerless to adhere to other eggs or to any object, and left the eggs as free and 
clean as those of whitefish or shad, and enabled the attendant to remove all bad 
eggs from the top, as was done with other eggs hatched in jars. The figures of 
results given by Mather for 1894 were as follows: 
Eggs taken , : 31,708,000 
Loss of eggs 9,105,000 
Fry planted ' : 22,603,000 
“The figures show,” he said, “that over 71 per cent of the eggs taken produced 
fry, and the reports of a few years ago show that when we produced 50 per cent, 
and thought it good, Mr. Clark remarked that it was as good as might be done 
with adhesive eggs.” 
In the report of the commissioner of fisheries of Pennsylvania for 1907 (p. 136) 
Jerry R. Berkhous, superintendent of the Torresdale hatchery, made a report on 
smelt hatching, having successfully taken 5,000,000 eyed eggs from Cold Spring 
Harbor to his hatchery, where they hatched in about a week. He said that he 
found the hatching of smelt eggs very easy by following instructions given him by 
Mr. Walters of the Cold Spring Harbor hatchery, and Mr. Safford and Mr. Meehan, 
although he found it quite different from other fish work. He said that the eggs 
were the smallest he had ever seen. It required 500,000 to fill a liquid quart and 
they were as small as mustard seed, if not smaller. His experience was the same as 
that of others in that the eggs would not hatch when exposed to light. There was 
too much light even when he closed the window shutters, and to give them sufficient 
darkness he had to hang a dark cloth curtain in front of them. He remarked that 
the prevailing opinion that small fish give fry of pretty good size did not hold good 
with his fish, for the fry were so small that he had to use a screen of linen, and 
double at that, to keep them from escaping after they were in the fry tank. Even 
then a few managed to struggle through. 
They started to hatch about 10 o’clock at night, and in less than half an hour 
the entire 5,000,000 were hatched. He thought that a single sheet of linen would 
be sufficient to hold them. They began to hatch when he was in the dwelling house 
and the watchman called him. When he got to the hatching house he found the 
little fish passing through the single linen nearly as easily as he could “go through a 
door.” 
In 1912 J. F. McClendon submitted to the Bureau of Fisheries an article on “An 
improved method of hatching the eggs of the smelt,” based upon experiments con- 
ducted by him in the Embryological Laboratory of Cornell University Medical Col- 
lege, New York City. As the article contains much of interest and has not been 
published so far as the present writer is aware, it is included here: 
As is the case with all migratory marine bony fishes, the smelt migrates during the breeding sea- 
son from the sea into fresh water. The eggs are laid in clusters, preferably in small streams. Each 
egg membrane is provided with a pedicle which attaches the egg to some support or to another egg. 
