Towards the end of the Middle Ages new methods to counter the scarcity universally prevalent, despite the teaching in the thirteenth century of Peter of Vescenza, were eagerly sought. Dom Pinchon, a monk of the Abbey of Réome, seems the first to have conceived the idea of artificially fecundating the eggs of trout. He pressed out in turn the milt of a male and the eggs of a female into water, which he then agitated with his finger. He placed the resulting eggs in a wooden box, with a layer of fine sand on the bottom, and a willow grating above and at the two ends. The box till the moment of hatching was immersed in water flowing with a gentle stream. The process—described in a manuscript dated 1420, but not published till about 1850—naturally led to no practical results. Consequently Pinchon’s claim to be the father of modern Pisciculture—a term first used some three hundred years after his death—can hardly be sustained. His discoveries interest only from a historical point of view. The middle of the eighteenth century witnessed an improvement on Pinchon’s plan. In Sweden (where the care taken to protect fish even prohibited the ringing of bells at the spawning season) the bream, perch, and mullet attach their eggs either to rocks, or twigs of pine. Lund shut up males and females for three or four days in three boxes, furnished with twigs of pine, etc. (on which the fish spawned), and pierced with little holes to allow the entrance of water. He succeeded at his first attempt in raising from 50 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 practical fecundation by artificial means, experimented on trout and salmon for sixteen years before attaining definite success. He pressed in turn the eggs and milt into a vase half filled with water which he kept gently stirred with his hand. The fertilised eggs were at once placed in a grated box inside a larger chest, in which Jacobi had inserted at the sides and at the top fine metallic gratings to allow the easy flow in and out 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 weeks on their umbilical sac, and were then passed into a reservoir. By these simple means Jacobi, who for his services was granted by England a pension for life, solved the problem of protecting fertilised eggs against their enemies, and yet of leaving them in surroundings not unlike those of Nature. The experiment, as far as it went, succeeded admirably.