The egg-boxes at Stormontfield, unlike those at Huningue, are in the open air, and in consequence the eggs are exposed to the natural temperature, and take, on an average of the seasons, about 120 days to ripen into fish. For instance, the eggs laid down in November 1863 had not come to life at the time of my visit to the ponds in the second week of March 1864. The young fish, as soon as they are able to eat—which is not for a good few days, as the umbilical bag supplies all the food that is required for a time by the newly-hatched animal—are fed with particles of boiled liver. On the occasion of my last visit (December 22, 1864), Mr. Marshall threw a few crumbs into the pond, which caused an immediate rising of the fry at that spot in great numbers. It would, of course, have been a simple plan to turn each year’s fish out of the ponds into the river as they were hatched, but it was thought advisable rather to detain them till they were seized with the migratory instinct and assumed the scales of smolthood, which occurs, as already stated in other parts of this work, at the age of one and two years respectively. Indeed, the experiments conducted at the Stormontfield ponds have conclusively settled the long-fought battle of the parr, and proved indisputably that the parr is the young of the salmon, that it becomes transformed to a smolt, grows into a grilse, and ultimately attains the honour of full-grown salmonhood. The anomaly in the growth of the parr was also attempted to be solved at Stormontfield, but without success. In November and December 1857 provision was made for hatching in separate compartments the artificially-impregnated ova of—1, parr and salmon; 2, grilse and salmon; 3, grilse pure; 4, salmon pure. It was found, when the young of these different matches came to be examined early in April 1859, that the sizes of each kind varied a little, Mr. Buist, the superintendent of fisheries, informing us that—“1st, the produce of the salmon with salmon are 4 in. in length; 2d, grilse with salmon, 3½ in.; 3d, grilse with grilse, 3½ in.; 4th, parr with grilse, 3 in.; 5th, smolt from large pond, 5 in.” These results of a varied manipulation never got a fair chance of being of use as a proof in the disputation; for, owing to the limited extent of the ponds at the time, the experiments had to be matured in such small boxes or ponds as evidently tended to stunt the growth of the fish. Up to the present time the riddle which has so long puzzled our naturalists in connection with the growth of the salmon has not been solved. A visitor whom I met at the ponds was of opinion that a sufficient quantity of milt was not used in the fructification of the eggs, as the male fish were scarcer than the female ones, and that those eggs which first came into contact with the milt produced the stronger fish.