As an example, take his method with the bastard carp, or Carassius pekinensis. “In order to breed from the chi fish, it is ripped up with a bamboo knife, and small quantities of quicksilver, mixed with river sediment, and yu-ts’ai are introduced into the belly. The fish is then stuffed with cabbage leaves, and hung up for forty-nine days” (note here, the time is pre-ordained, and alters not, as with us nowadays, with changes in the temperature of the water flowing over the eggs) “in an empty place, after which river water is used to extract one or two eggs from the belly. These are placed in water, and covered up with something, and after a while each egg turns into a fish.”
Such ingenious industry, coupled with no small expenditure on quicksilver, yu-ts’ai, and cabbage, deserved a far better return. Had Fan Li intelligently anticipated a method in vogue among his countrymen some two and a half millennia later, money, labour, time, would all have been saved. But as Rome was not built in a day, so centuries were necessary for the evolution of a method of fish-hatching absolutely (to me) unique.
“Not once or twice in its rough” world’s story must the ample, yet guileless, bosom of the domestic hen have swelled with anticipatory pride, and subsequent resentful curiosity, as the results of her “watchful waiting” emerged in guise of ugly ducklings, swans, or cormorants.
But of all the sittings to borrow her body’s warmth, the strangest and the most incongruous—after all, the ducklings were terrestrial, of a kith akin to her, and not aquatic and unregistered aliens—was that composed of hundreds of fish eggs!
Lest this last sentence seem to label me as a descendant of “the first pre-Pelasgian piscator” from whom, in Sir O. Seaman’s witty verse,
“From whom have sprung (I own a bias To ways the cult of rod and fly has) All fishermen—and Ananias!”
or lest it seem to disqualify me for the character bestowed by Alciphron on an angler, of being one “who would never even slip into misrepresentation,” I call no less a witness than Mr. S. Wells Williams, LL.D., late Professor of the Chinese Language and Literature at Yale College, and author of Tonic and Syllabic Dictionaries of the Chinese Language.
From page 349 come ipsissima verba:[1148] “The Bulletin Universel for 1829 asserts that in some parts of China spawn is carefully placed in an empty egg-shell, and the hole closed: the egg is then replaced in the nest and after the hen has sat a few days upon it reopened, and then placed in vessels of water warmed in the sun, where it soon hatches!”
De Thiersant, in his assertion that “from time immemorial it has been the policy of the Government and officials to protect fishing in every way,” and Mr. Yen in his that “our ancient classics mention the appointment, several centuries before the Christian era, of special officials to rule over and protect our fishermen,” indicate that a Board of Fisheries came into existence at an early date.
The Chou Li, or The Rites of the Chou Dynasty (c. 1000 b.c.) point distinctly to wardens being appointed for fishing purposes. We read, in fact, of an official staff, called Fishermen attached to the Imperial Court: “They were entrusted with the fishing appropriate to each season, and made dams for catching fish.”