NATIONAL FISHERY CONGRESS. 
317 
with false bottoms guided by upright standards used in raising and lowering the 
false bottoms for the better examination of the fish. Each compartment will carry 
about 250 fish at a time, or about twice that number during the season, as the num- 
bers are continually being added to and taken from, as new arrivals come in and the 
older ones are stripped and sent to market. 
The fish are sorted into three classes, which are denominated soft, medium, and 
hard, and are handled as little as possible. The softs are examined the next day after 
being sorted, the ripe ones stripped, and the others reclassified if necessary — the 
mediums on the third day and the hards in about a week, it having been found by 
experience that very little spawn is lost by thus holding and very much unnecessary 
handling is obviated. 
Although large numbers of fish were not penned at Put-in Bay the past season, 
owing to almost continuous gales, the experiment proved a complete success, as show- 
ing what can be done in an ordinary season. Over 10,000,000 eggs of good quality 
were taken, and it should be remembered that but for the penning the eggs would 
have gone to market in the abdomens of the fish and been lost. The fish, notwith- 
standing the adverse circumstances under which they were taken, did remarkably 
well, and only seven were lost because of becoming diseased, and they had been 
injured in the pound nets before coming to our hands. The last fish turned over to 
the fishermen were in as fine condition as if just taken from a pound, and some of 
them had been in confinement for a month. 
As to the limitations and results, they must be largely a matter of speculation. 
With penning successfully carried out there would seem to be practically no limit to 
the number of fry which can be turned out, and then comes the question, To what extent 
is the hatching of whitetish beneficial? The statistics do not answer the question in a 
manner entirely encouraging to the fish-culturists, and yet I believe I am safe in 
saying that there is not a commercial fisherman on Lake Erie who does not think that 
the hatcheries have done much to increase the take of whitefish, many of them openly 
asserting that but for the work of artificial propagation whitefish would be practically 
extinct in the lake. They cite in proof of this that while the increase has not been 
what they might hope, the whitefish has reasonably held its own, while all other 
commercial fishes have rapidly fallen off. 
There is another encouraging feature to be noted. If common report is to be 
taken for anything, the catch of whitefish has been greater in Lake Erie the past 
season than for several years past. This is especially the case with the gill nets in 
deep water, also with the pounds at the head of the lake, so the writer is informed 
on what seems to be trustworthy authority. Of course it is too early yet to have 
reliable statistics as to just what the catch was. The fish were small and of quite 
uniform size, which lead the fishermen to the conclusion that at least a considerable 
portion of them were the result of the large hatch of the season 1895-96, when 
121,000,000 fry were planted in Lake Erie from Put in Bay station, and when the 
Detroit hatchery of the Michigan Pish Commission and the Sandwich hatchery of 
the Dominion Government of Canada made specially large plants, all of which found 
their way into Lake Erie. 
In common with other fish-culturists the writer believes that the work of arti- 
ficially increasing the number of whitefish in Lake Erie and the other waters to 
which this fish is indigenous will be greatly improved when some practical way is 
