CHAPTER III.
FISH CULTURE.
Antiquity of Pisciculture—Italian Fish-Culture—Sergius Orata—Re-discovery of the Art—Gehin and Remy—Jacobi—Shaw of Drumlanrig—The Ettrick Shepherd—Scientific and Commercial Pisciculture—A Trip to Huningue—Tourist Talk about Fish—Bale—Huningue described—The Water Supply—Modus Operandi at Huningue—Packing Fish Eggs—An Important Question—Artificial Spawning—Danube Salmon—Statistics of Huningue—Plan of a Suite of Ponds—M. De Galbert’s Establishment—Practical Nature of Pisciculture—Turtle-Culture—Best Kinds of Fish to Rear—Pisciculture in Germany—Stormontfield Salmon-Breeding Ponds—Design for a Suite of Salmon-Ponds—Statistics of Stormontfield—Acclimatisation of Fish—The Australian Experiment—Introduction of the Silurus glanis.
Pisciculture may be briefly described as the art of fecundating and hatching fish-eggs, and of nursing young fish under protection till they are of an age to take care of themselves.
The art of pisciculture is almost as old as civilisation itself. We read of its having been practised in the empire of China for many centuries, and we also know that it was much thought of in the palmy days of ancient Italy, when expensively-fed fish of all kinds were a necessity of the wonderful banquets given by wealthy Romans and Neapolitans. There is still in China a large trade in fish-eggs, and boats may be seen containing men who gather the spawn in various rivers, and then carry it into the interior of the country for sale, where the young fish are reared in great flocks or shoals in the rice-fields. One Chinese mode of collecting fish-spawn is to map out a river into compartments by means of mats and hurdles, leaving only a passage for the boats. The mats and hurdles intercept the spawn, which is skimmed off the water, preserved for sale in large jars, and is bought by persons who have ponds or other pieces of water which they may wish to stock with gold or other fish. One Chinese plan is to hatch fish-eggs in paddy-fields, and in these places the spawn speedily comes to life, and the flocks of little fishes are herded from one field to another as the food becomes exhausted. The trade in ova is so well managed, even in the present day, that fish are plentiful and cheap—so cheap as to form a large portion of the food of the people; and nothing so much surprises the Chinese who come here as the high price that is paid for the fish of this country. A Chinese fisherman was much astonished, three years ago, at the price he was charged for a fish-breakfast at Toulon. This person had arrived in France with four or five thousand young fish of the best kinds produced in his country, for the purpose of their being placed in the great marine aquarium in the Bois de Boulogne. Being annoyed at the comparative scarcity of fish in France, the young Chinaman wrote a brief memoir, showing that, with the command of a small pond, any quantity of fish might be raised at a trifling expense. All that is necessary, he stated in the memoir alluded to, is to watch the period of spawning, and throw yolks of eggs into the water from time to time, by which means an incredible quantity of the young fry are saved from destruction. For, according to the information conveyed by this very intelligent youth, thousands of young fish annually die from starvation—they are unable to seek their own food at so tender an age. We cannot believe all the stories we hear about the Chinese mode of breeding fish, they are so evidently exaggerated; but I must notice one particularly ingenious method of artificial hatching which has been resorted to by the people of China and which is worth noting as a piscicultural novelty. These ingenious Celestials carry on a business in selling and hatching fish-spawn, collecting the impregnated eggs from various rivers and lakes, in order to sell to the proprietors of canals and private ponds. When the proper season for hatching arrives, they empty a hen’s egg, by means of a small aperture, sucking out the natural contents, and then, after substituting fish-spawn, close up the opening. The egg thus manipulated is placed for a few days under a hen! By and by the shell is broken, and the contents are placed in a vessel of water, warmed by the heat of the sun only; the eggs speedily burst, and in a short time the young fish are able to be transported to a lake or river of ordinary temperature, where they are of course left to grow to maturity without being further noticed than to have a little food thrown to them.
The luxurious Romans achieved great wonders in the art of fish-breeding, and were able to perform curious experiments with the piscine inhabitants of their aquariums; they were also well versed in the arts of acclimatisation. A classic friend, who is well versed in ancient fish lore, tells me that the great Roman epicures could run their fish from ice-cold water into boiling cauldrons without handling them! They spared neither labour nor money in order to gratify their palates. The Italians sent to the shores of Britain for their oysters, and then flavoured them in large quantities on artificial beds. The value of a Roman gentleman’s fish in the palmy days of Italian banqueting was represented by an enormous sum of money. The stock kept up by Lucullus was never valued at a less sum than £35,000! These classic lovers of good things had pet breeds of fish in the same sense as gentlemen in the present day have pet breeds of sheep or homed cattle. Lucullus, for instance, to have such a valuable stock, must have been in possession of unique varieties derived from curious crosses, etc. Red mullet or fat carp, which sold for large prices, were not at all unusual. Sixty pounds we can ascertain as being given for a single mullet, and more than three times that sum for a dish of that fish; and enormous sums of money were lavished in the buying, rearing, and taming of the mullet; so much so, that some of those who devoted their time and money to this purpose were satirised as mullet-millionaires. One noble Roman went to a fabulous expense in boring a tunnel through a mountain, in order that he might obtain a plentiful supply of salt water for his fish-ponds. Sergius Orata invented artificial oyster-beds. He caused, as will be afterwards described when I come to speak of oyster-farming, to be constructed at Baiæ, on the Lucrine Sea, great reservoirs, where he grew the dainty mollusc in thousands; and in order that he and his friends might have this renowned shell-fish in its very highest perfection, he built a palace on the coast, in order to be near his oyster-ponds; and thither he resorted when he wanted to have a fish-dinner free from the care and turmoil of business. Many of the more luxurious Italians, imitating Sergius Orata, expended fabulous sums of money on their fish-ponds, and were so enabled, by means of their extravagance, to achieve all kinds of outré results in the fattening and flavouring of their fish. A curious story, illustrative of these times and of the value set on fish of a particular flavour, is related, in regard to the bass (labrax lupus) which were caught in the river Tiber. The Roman epicures were very fond of this fish, especially of those caught in a particular portion of the river, which they could tell by means of their taste and fine colour. An exquisite, while dining, was horrified at being served with bass of the wrong flavour, and loudly complained of the badness of the fish; the fact being that the real bass (the high-coloured kind) were flavoured by the disgusting food which they obtained at the mouth of a common sewer.
The modern phase of pisciculture is entirely a commercial one, which as yet does not lie in imparting fanciful flavours to the fish—although, if such were wanted, it might easily enough be accomplished—but has developed itself both at home and abroad in the replenishing of exhausted streams with salmon, trout, or other kinds of fish. The present idea of pisciculture, as a branch of commerce, is due to the shrewdness of a simple French peasant, who gained his livelihood as a pêcheur in the tributaries of the Moselle, and the other streams of his native district, La Bresse in the Vosges. He was a thinking man, although a poor one, and it had long puzzled him to understand how animals yielding such an abundant supply of eggs should, by any amount of fishing, ever become scarce. He knew very well that all female fish were provided with tens of thousands of eggs, and he could not well see how, in the face of this fact, the rivers of La Bresse should be so scantily peopled with the finny tribes. Nor was the scarcity of fish confined to his own district: the rivers of France generally had become impoverished; and as in all Catholic countries fish is a prime necessary of life, the want of course was greatly felt. Joseph Remy was the man who first found out what was wrong with the French streams, and especially with the fish supplies of his native rivers—and better than that, he discovered a remedy. He ascertained that the scarcity of fish was chiefly caused by the immense number of eggs that never came to life, the enormous quantity of young fish that were destroyed by enemies of one kind or another, and the fishing-up of all that was left, in many instances, before they had an opportunity to reproduce themselves; at any rate, without any care being taken to leave a sufficient breeding stock in the rivers, so that the result he discovered had become inevitable.
The guiding fact of pisciculture has been more than once accidentally re-discovered—that is, allowing that the ancient Romans knew it exactly as now practised; but nothing came of such discoveries, and till a discovery be turned to some practical use, it is, in a sense, no discovery at all. After being lost for many hundred years, the art of artificially spawning fish was re-discovered in Germany by one Jacobi, and practised on some trout more than a century ago. This gentleman not only practised pisciculture himself, but wrote essays on the subject as well. His elaborate treatise on the art of fish-culture was written in the German language, but also translated into Latin, and inserted by Duhamel du Monceau, in his General Treatise on Fishes. Jacobi, who practised the art for thirty years, was not satisfied with a mere discovery, but at once turned what he had discovered to practical account, and, in the time of Jacobi, great attention was devoted to pisciculture by various gentlemen of scientific eminence. Count Goldstein, a savan of the period, likewise wrote on the subject. The Journal of Hanover also had papers on this art, and an account of Jacobi’s proceedings was enrolled in the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Berlin. This discovery of Jacobi was the simple result of keen observation of the natural action of the breeding salmon. Observing that the process of impregnation was entirely an external act, he saw at once that this could be easily imitated by careful manipulation; so that, by conducting artificial hatching on a large scale, a constant and unfailing supply of fish might readily be obtained. The results arrived at by Jacobi were of vast importance, and obtained not only the recognition of his government, but also the more solid reward of a pension. I need not detail the experiments of Jacobi, as they are very similar to those of others that I intend to describe at full length in this portion of my narrative.
Some persons dispute the claims of France to the honour of this discovery, asserting that the peasant Remy had borrowed his idea from the experiments of Shaw of Drumlanrig, who had by the artificial system undertaken to prove that parrs were the young of the salmon. As I shall again have occasion to allude to Mr. Shaw’s experiments, I do not require to say more at present on this part of my subject than that they were brought to a successful conclusion long before the rediscovery of the art of pisciculture by Remy. In my opinion the honours may be thus divided, whether Remy knew of Shaw’s experiments or not: I would give to Scotland the honour of having re-discovered pisciculture as an adjunct of science, and to France the useful part of having turned the art to commercial uses. In regard to what has been already stated here as to the accidental discovery of artificial fish-breeding, I may mention that James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, was one of the discoverers. Hogg had an observant eye for rural scenes and incidents, and anxiously studied and experimented on fish-life. He took an active share in the parr controversy. Having seen with his own eyes the branded parr assuming the scales of the smolt, he never doubted after that the fact that the parr was the young of the salmon. In Norway, too, an accidental discovery of this fish-breeding power was made; and certainly if salmon-fishing in that country goes on at its present rate cultivation will be largely required. The artificial plan of breeding oysters has been more than once accidentally discovered. There is at least one well-authenticated instance of this, which occurred about a century ago, when a saltmaker of Marennes, who added to his income by fattening oysters, lost a batch of six thousand in consequence of an intense frost, the shells not being sufficiently covered with water; but while engaged in mourning over his loss and kicking about the dead molluscs, he found them, greatly to his surprise, covered with young oysters already pretty well developed, and these, fortunately, although tender, all in good health, so that ultimately he repeopled his salt-bed without either trouble or expense—having of course to wait the growth of the natives before he could recommence his commerce.