188 PROPAGATION OF TROUT IN AMERICA. 
Reome, was the inventor of the present plan of hatching fish in boxes. His 
inventive faculty was doubtless inspired by the necessity of providing for 
the numerous fasts prescribed by the Church of Rome. After Father 
Piuchon, much time elapsed before the art of propagating fish travelled Ear, 
but it was next discovered on its westward march, when M. Jacobi,a ( ter- 
man, in 1763 presented his results of thirty years' application before the 
Royal Academy of Berlin. The interest thus excited was not suffered to 
die entirely, though the incredulous retarded its benefits until the success 
of a few philosophical capitalists became so patent to all who could see 
and read, that fish by artificial propagation soon became an article of 
commerce. More recently " the abundant success which attended the 
institution at Heningen, in which a million of trout have, in a single 
year, been hatched and reared," so interested the men of science through- 
out Europe, that a savant of France reported it to the French Minister 
of Agriculture and Commerce in February 1843, accompanied with the 
following comments : — " Fish-culture, which had obtained among the 
ancients so high a degree of perfection, is, in our own days, fallen to 
such a state of decadence, that it is scarcely reckoned among the least 
important branches of modern industry, and nevertheless, our social 
conditions have at no time more imperiously demanded of us again to 
restore it to a level with the continual increase of our population. 
There exists not, I safely affirm one single branch of industry or of culture 
which with less chance of loss, offers to realise more important benefits." 
The people of the British Isles were, apparently, first awakened to 
the subject of propagating trout and salmon by artificial means, through 
the experiments of Messrs. Shaw and Young, which first resulted in 
the humourously discussed question in one of the British magazines, 
about the year 1840 on " The Transmutations of the Salmon," which 
startled public curiosity with a premonition of those facts which 
were fully elucidated in France by Messrs. Gehin and Remyin 1847, and 
divided interest with the continental revolutions of 1848. 
Although the French government recognised the importance of the 
invention of Gehin and Remy by a liberal reward in money and lucra- 
tive employment in carrying forward the experiment under government 
patronage, so that millions of trout and salmon were annually hatched by 
artificial propagation, yet the people of Britain did not engage in it until 
after the year 1 850, when Messrs. Edmund and Thomas Ashworth are 
said to have been the first to test it, by stocking some of the rivers on 
encumbered estates in Ireland, under the superintendence of Mr. Robert 
Ramsbottom. But in America, up to the present time, only a very few 
gentlemen have engaged in the enterprize, first among whom is R. L. 
Pell, Esq., late President of the Agricultural Club of the American 
Institute in New York, and Mr. Stephen H. Ainsworth, a trout breeder 
in West Bloomfield, N. Y. To these may be added Solon Robinson and 
Prof. Maeps as scientific gentlemen and experimenters, the first of whom 
Stated before the American Institute, " That trout can be artificially 
