Amateur Fish Culture

My aim, in this little book, has been to give information and hints which will prove useful to the amateur. Some of the plans and apparatus suggested would not be suitable for fish culture on a large scale, but my object has been to confine myself entirely to operations on a small scale. I have to thank the Editor of Land and Water for permission to publish in book form what first appeared as a series of articles.
CHARLES WALKER.
Mayfield, Sussex. March, 1901.
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Fish culture of a certain kind dates from very early times, but its scientific development has only come about quite recently. Most people know that in our own country the monks had stew ponds, where they kept fish, principally carp, and also that the Romans kept fish in ponds. In the latter case we hear more often of the eel than of other fish. The breeding of trout and salmon, and the artificial spawning and hatching of ova, are, however, an innovation of our own time.
Much has been discovered about the procreation of fish, and in no case have scientists worked so hard and discovered more than in the case of Salmonidæ . Fish culture, particularly trout culture, has become a trade, and a paying one. To any one who has the least idea of the difficulties to be overcome in rearing Salmonidæ , this fact alone proves that fish culture must have progressed to a very advanced stage as a science.
This advance has in very many, if not in the majority of cases, been made by the bitter experience gained through failures and mishaps, for these have led fish culturists to try many different means to prevent mischances, or to rectify them if they have happened. Some of the most serious difficulties experienced by the early fish culturists who bred Salmonidæ can now be almost disregarded, for they hardly exist for the modern fish culturist, with the knowledge he possesses of the experience of others.
So much of what has been done in fish culture is generally known to those who have studied and practised it, that the beginner can nowadays commence far ahead of the point whence the first fish culturists started. Many of his difficulties have been overcome for him already, and though he will not, of course, meet with the success of the man of experience, still he ought with the exercise of an average amount of intelligence to avoid such failures as would completely disgust him.