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