SOME BRIEF REMINISCENCES OF THE EARLY DAYS OF FISH-CULTURE 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 
By LIVINGSTON STONE; 
Superintendent of United States Fish Commission Station at Cape Vincent , Neso Yot k. 
About a third of a century ago a strange story began to be spread abroad in this 
country that a man in western New York was hatching trout eggs — thousands upon 
thousands — and that he was rearing the fish and feeding them in ponds, and that 
there was literally no end to the number of fish he could hatch. The story naturally 
made a decided sensation throughout the country, but of all the people who heard the 
story there were very few at first who believed it. The present age of almost daily 
recurring marvels had hardly begun then, and people were more incredulous and 
slower to accept apparent miracles than they are now; and then again, the country 
being in the throes of civil war at the time, it followed that discoveries in peaceful 
arts did not attract the attention that they would have done in quieter times. But 
the story about the man who was hatching thousands upon thousands of trout steadily 
gained ground. Presently the great New York dailies took it up, and soon after it 
came to be an accepted fact that something very wonderful was certainly being done 
by this New York trout- hatcher. 
In the meantime the man himself, quietly working away in Caledonia, had 
succeeded in actually proving beyond a doubt that the hatching of trout on au 
immense scale — not as an experiment, but as a practical industry — was within the 
easy reach of human skill. It was the first time that this had been accomplished. 
Amateur and scientific experiments on a small scale had been made by various per- 
sons at various times, and the method of hatching fish artificially had been known 
for a century, but it remained for Seth Green to introduce into America the hatching 
of fish as a practical and valuable industry, and to him belong the credit and the 
honor of opening the way to the vast practical work that has since been accomplished 
iu this country in hatching and rearing fish, and to him eminently belongs the title, 
justly earned, of the “ father of American fish-culture.” 
A year or two after Seth Green had inaugurated American fish-culture at 
Caledonia, the writer established the Gold Spring trout ponds at Charlestown, New 
Hampshire, but strange to say, up to this time, although Seth Green’s operations in 
New York had been so fascinating and so promising, no one else in this country had 
taken up the breeding of trout at which he had been so successful. 
The time, however, was now ripe for the spread of trout culture, and very soon 
after the establishment of the Cold Spring trout ponds trout breeding places sprang 
up iu all directions. Raising trout suddenly became fashionable and popular. During 
^ the first two years of his trout breeding experience the writer received letters from 
almost every State in the Union, written by persons actually engaged in, or more 
337 
T. C. B. 1897—22 
