THE TE.CHN0LO.GrS T. 
PROPAGATION OF TROUT IN AMERICA. 
(Concluded from p. 185.) 
Pisciculturists of Europe have traced the artificial propagation of 
fish to the Chinese, thence- — moving with empire — the Romans paid 
signal homage to fish-culture as a pet philosophical pastime for several 
of the most distinguished epicurean Emperors. Lucullus — the gourmand 
who dined on peacocks' tongues — expended very large sums in the for- 
mation of fish-ponds. Some of them he supplied with sea-water by- 
means of a canal cut from the Mediterranean to his villa at Tusculum. 
Sergius Orata, in the time of Crassus, stocked the Lucrine Lake with' 
oysters, and derived large revenues therefrom ; while the apparatus used 
in ostraculture on the Lake of Fusaro formed the base upon which the 
French have constructed their system of ostraculture of the present day. 
We saw T recently in the Treasury at Naples, among articles exhumed from 
the ruins of Pompeii, a glass vase of fish eggs in a perfect state of preser- 
vation, though having been put up 1,800 years previously. It was sup- 
posed to be caviare, but on reflection we have been led to doubt it, because 
the eggs were as large as those which belong to the Salmo genus, and the 
glass vase was similar in shape to the bottles used in France by fish-cul- 
turists to export fecundated roe to all parts of the world, and it is now 
claimed that it can be preserved for years without addling an egg. We 
know that the eggs have been shipped first from France to England, and 
from thence to Australia where they have been hatched — both trout and 
salmon — and were doing so well that Prof. Ramsbottom, who is the .fish 
artist of the enterprise, recently expressed surprise at the rapidity of 
their growth — it being much greater than on the British Isles. 
From fish-culture in the most refined part of ancient Rome, by the 
patricians, we next trace it to the Monks of the mountains — those men of 
science and experiment who invented eau de vie, the water of life, com- 
monly known as brandy — where Don Pinchon, a monk of the abbey 
VOL. VI. t 
