FISH CULTURE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21983, 19 June 1933, Page 4

FISH CULTURE

SALMON OVA FOR NEW ZEALAND SEQUEL TO AN 1878 CONSIGNMENT. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, May 12. Professor Garstang, of Leeds University, has delivered a series of lectures under the Frank Buckland Foundation on economic fish culture and those have now been published in pamphlet form. In one of the addresses Professor Garstang refers to Frank Buckland, who died'" in 1880. leaving the nation his museum of fish culture, now at South Kensington, and a reversionary sum of £SOOO with which to endow a professorship of fish culture. Buckland was a naturalist from boyhood, and relinquished his appointment as army surgeon to follow his real bent, starting'"Land and Water." and eventually becoming an inspector of fisheries. From 1807—the date of the latter appointment —down to his death in 1880. all his time and energy were practically devoted to fishery duties and problems. The boy who at Winchester was noted for his skill in wiring trout, and later in hatching salmon and perch ova, became famous as a " water farmer " whose great object was to increase and render more available the harvest of the sea and rivers. His death at the early age of 54 (as Professor Garstang reminds us) was entirely due to the recklessness of his devotion to the cause- he had at heart. In 1878 came a telegraphic request from the New Zealand Government for an additional consignment of salmon ova. He knew the request was desperately late, but at once raced north to Newcastle only to find the fish spent in the Tyne; thence to Carlisle to find the same state of things in the Caldew. Any ordinary man would have given it up, but he doubled back to Devonshire, and got what he wanted just in time to catch the steamer for New Zealand. But he undermined a vigorous constitution, and never recovered from the effects of the prolonged exposure to icy water and driving snowstorms which he \ endured on this occasion.