M. Baude explains the matter very clearly, in his recently published and very important work on Fishery. He shows very clearly that, of all creatures, the fish consumes the least, and produces the most. Merely to keep that creature alive, nothing, or next to nothing, is required. Rondelet kept a carp three years in a bottle of water, and gave it nothing save what it could extract from that water; yet, in that time, it so increased in bulk that he could not get it out of the bottle! The Salmon, during its stay, of two months, in fresh water, scarcely feeds at all, and yet in that time scarcely loses flesh. Its stay in salt water, during the same space of time, gives it the enormous increase of six pounds in weight. How little that resembles the slow growth of our land animals! If we were to pile up into one heap all that it takes to fatten an Ox or a Pig, we should actually be astounded at the amount of food required for the like increase of weight. And, accordingly, those people whose demand most urgently presses upon their power of supply, the Chinese, with their three hundred millions of ever craving appetites, have directly applied themselves to the art of promoting that great power of reproduction, that richest manufacture of nourishing food. On all the great rivers of China, prodigious multitudes find in the waters, the food which they would but vainly ask from the land. Agriculture is always more or less precarious; a blighting wind, a frost, the slightest accident, can sentence a whole nation to all the horrors of Famine. But, on the contrary, the living and teeming, the exulting and abounding, harvest beneath the waters, nourishes innumerable families, and makes those families almost as prolific and abounding as itself. In May, on the great central river of the Empire, a vast trade is done in Fish _fry_, which is bought, sold, and resold, for the purpose of stocking the fish-ponds of private persons, who feed their fish from the mere offal of the household. The Romans,--so long ago!--had the same wise system;--only they, sometimes, were barbarous enough to feed their fish with slaves! Bad enough, that, and to spare; but at least they left us the precious legacy of these words--"The spawn of the sea fish _can_ become fish in fresh water." In the last century, a German, by the name of Jacobi, discovered, or rather, revived, the art of _artificial fecundation_; and, in our own century, and with still more productive effect, France, copying from England, has done the same thing. A fisherman of Bresse, Remy, has practised, since 1840, the art which has now become European.