A curious and vicarious manner of Indian fishing can be witnessed on the Brahmaputra. Birds of the cormorant family range themselves midstream in line, and advance towards a bank, making a prodigious pother by flapping the water with their wings. The fish, panic-stricken, flee to the shallows and even throw themselves on land. The birds, still in close array, pursue and gorge themselves on their penned-in prey.
“Now enter villagers,” who as soon as feeding ceases, rush to the bank and by drums, gongs, and every conceivable noise frighten the cormorants. Heavy from over-repletion, they have, before they can fly, to lighten themselves of most of their meal, which in due time provides the peasants’ supper! This method, if it does not appeal to the palate, possesses the merit of semi-poetic and retributive justice.[1139]
De Thiersant’s assertion that to the Chinese belongs the honour of being the first to invent pisciculture can only be allowed to pass, if the term be restricted to hatching out by natural means, bringing up, and caring for young fish. From this, pisciculture proper differs as chalk from cheese. Originated by Rémy in the last century, it consists of artificial fecundation by the extrusion and mixture of the milt of the male and of the eggs of the female, the hatching out of the eggs on specially constructed trays of wire, etc., set in running water, and the nurture of the fry on specially adapted food in carefully prepared and graduated ponds.
De Thiersant himself, a few pages later,[1140] makes the point clear. Chinese fish-breeders do not resort to artificial fecundation, with which they were even in 1870 very faintly acquainted, for several reasons, not least of which was their contention that fish thus produced were predisposed to quick deterioration.[1141]
The Chinese (like the Roman) method of fish-breeding in the eighteenth century,[1142] and till 1872, consisted in gathering from collecting fences constructed for the purpose[1143] eggs which had been fertilised naturally. These were carried (sometimes hundreds of miles, for the secret of safe transportation had early been mastered) to ponds or streams for natural, not artificial hatching. The young fry were guarded carefully, and fed most watchfully.
Gray[1144] enumerates some of the many and minute precautions as to shelter and food. Rockeries were erected in the ponds to shelter the alevin from the sun. Bananas were planted on the sides and banks, because the rain which falls from their leaves during a shower promoted health. Forbidden, however, were all pigeons, whose dung was held hurtful, and also (contrary to our experience of the haunt of many and good fish) all willows, whose leaves were deemed inimical to the growth, even to the life of the fry.
“The earliest pisciculturist of ancient China,” states Mr. Yen, “was T’ao Chu-kung,[1145] who lived in the fifth century B.C. His method of fish culture combined both knowledge and ignorance. He dug a pond of the size of an acre, leaving nine small islands scattered about it. In one pond he placed twenty female carp, three feet in length, and four males of similar size. This was done in the month of March. Exactly one year later, there were 5000 fishes one foot long, 10,000 two feet long, and 15,000 three feet long. In the third year the number had multiplied ten or twenty times, in the fourth year it was not possible to keep count.”
While congratulating T’ao on the nimbleness of his enumerators and his success, and haggling not at the numbers (for the Cypridæ breed prolifically), both the disparity in growth and the similarity of the exactly graded variations in size of these, all yearling, fish are unto the practical pisciculturist a stumbling-block, which neither cannibalism nor luck of food can displace.
But to return to T’ao, or rather to his islands. “The nine islands were to deceive the fishes, who would believe that they were in the big ocean, travelling round the nine continents.” We may complacently smile at these fancies, but at any rate let us humbly recall the 2300 years we took to solve the problem of the generation of eels, and the fantastic theories propounded by Aristotle, by Izaak Walton, and others, some of which, e.g. the Cairncross, read as ludicrous as T’ao’s “Happy Isles.”[1146]
Fan Li apparently was the first to practise fish breeding not only in China, but in the world.[1147] Living in the early fifth century b.c. he antedates the Roman Varro, our earliest authority, by some three hundred years. He not only bred, but wrote about fish. But to brother-breeder and brother-writer of the present century like myself, the process as set forth in his Yang Yü Ching (Treatise on Fish-breeding), is not only difficult to follow in detail, but sadly lacking in result.