Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

292 ROMAN AND MODERN PISCICULTUREmodern Pisciculture—a term first used some three hundredyears after his death—can hardly be sustained.His discoveriesinterest only from a historical point of view.The middle of the eighteenth century witnessed an improvementon Pinchon's plan. In Sweden (where the care taken toprotect fish even prohibited the ringing of bells at the spawningseason) the bream, perch, and mullet attach their eggs eitherto rocks, or twigs of pine.Lund shut up males and females for three or four days inthree boxes, furnished with twigs of pine, etc. (on which thefish spawned), and pierced with little holes to allow the entranceof water. He succeeded at his first attempt in raising from50 female bream, 3,100,000 fry; from 100 perch, 3,215,000 fry ;and from 100 mullet, 4,000,000 fry.Jacobi of Westphalia, the first real inventor of practicalfecundation by artificial means, experimented on trout andsalmon for sixteen years before attaining definite success.He pressed in turn the eggs and milt into a vase half filledwith water which he kept gently stirred with his hand. Thefertilised eggs were at once placed in a grated box inside alarger chest, in which Jacobi had inserted at the sides and atthe top fine metallic gratings to allow the easy flow in andout of water over the sand or gravel lying at the bottom.The apparatus was set in a trench by the side of a brook, or,better still,in an artificial channel into which springs were led.The young fish after hatching lived for three or four weekson their umbilical sac, and were then passed into a reservoir.By these simple means Jacobi, who for his services wasgranted by England a pension for life, solved the problem ofprotecting fertilised eggs against their enemies, and yet ofleaving them in surroundings not unlike those of Nature.The experiment, as far as it went, succeeded admirably.In Great Britain 1 Shaw, Andrew, Young, Knox, andBoccius, and in Germany, Blooch, and others carried on, atvarious times and with varying methods and measures of^ Leonard Mascall, owing to his recipes for preserving spawn in his Bookeof Fishing 1590, "must be looked upon as the pioneer of fish-culture inEngland," according to Mr. R. B. Marston, op. cit., 35.