A Historical Sketch of Fish-culture. 
93 
his experiments to the French naturalist Button, and in 
1763 he published a paper on the subject in the Hanno- 
verisches Afogazin. This was re-published in France in 1773, 
but not until 1841 in England. In 1758 his ideas were 
pirated by Golstein, Grand Chancellor of the Duchy of 
Berg, though he eventually obtained full credit as the orig¬ 
inal discoverer. In 1854 a claim was advanced by the 
French that Artificial Fertilization had been discovered in 
their own country some 300 years before Jacobi, and an old 
manuscript was produced, purporting to be a description of 
the process as performed by the Abb<$ Dom Pinchon, of the 
Convent of Rdome, in Burgundy, in the year 1420. This 
manuscript, it was claimed, had been kept a secret for 434 
years, though no reason was given for doing so. The claim 
is regarded as a weak one, and Dom Pinchon’s method is 
believed to have been simply the transplanting of naturally 
fertilized eggs under protective conditions. Some authori¬ 
ties, however, say that the Abbd really did practise this 
art, but only for the benefit of his brother monks, and that 
the secret died with him. 
There is also a claim that Spallanzani, an Italian, made 
experiments in the same direction with the eggs of frogs 
in 1752, after the commencement of Jacobi’s researches, 
but before their publication. The honor of the original 
discovery remains, however, with Germany. 
Jacobi’s first experiments were tried upon trout — prob¬ 
ably the brown trout (Salmo fario ), which is the common 
trout of Europe. He had observed these upon their spawn¬ 
ing beds in the German streams, and found that from the 
last of November to the first of February they would fre¬ 
quent shallow places, and dig furrows in the gravelly beds 
and there deposit their eggs. He thereupon caught spawn¬ 
ing trout of both sexes, extracted the eggs of the female 
and the milt of the male, mixing them together in vessels 
half filled with water. The eggs, thus fertilized, he placed 
in wooden boxes pierced with holes covered with wire 
gauze and having a layer of sand at the bottom, and an- 
