From Robert Buist 5 March 1868
Perth
5 March 1868.
Dear Sir,
I duly received your Note of the 28th. ulto, and beg to send you by this post copies of my little Pamphlet and articles on the Stormontfield Ponds which I sent to the Field Newspaper, in all of which I think you will find something for your purpose.1 In the Pamphlet you will find some strange facts regarding the anomalous nature of the Salmon, to which I request your particular attention.—2
The Keeper of our Stormontfield Breeding Ponds3 was in Perth yesterday, and I examined him regarding certain points in your communication. I allowed him to go, in the beginning of January last, to the north of England, to find impregnated ova for a Ship going to New Zealand,4 and he has given me certain facts bearing on your enquiries.
1. As to battles of male Salmon: he tells me that in the North Tyne he found about 300 dead males and only one dead female, and of these 300 males he is convinced that the whole had lost their lives by fighting with each other.—5 He had the command of the whole of the Duke of Northumberland’s6 waters in that river, and the greater part of the fish he took were landed by boat and net, and from that river and the Tweed he had made up all the number of ova that was required to complete the cargo. Of course the milt of one male is sufficient to impregnate the ova of two or three or more females. But you will find some strange facts regarding this in my book.
2. Proportional number of the Sexes. I must here also refer you to my book in which you will find and trace that about the 18th. month after hatching, the sexes of the fish are clearly discovered.7 While in some of the male fish the milt is clearly developed, when they are come to the size of a man’s finger, by shedding the milt over and mixing it with the ova of a grown Salmon of 7 or 8 lbs, it will produce young fish, as we have proved by experiment at our Ponds, where the fish are kept in separate boxes from the produce of entirely full grown fish. This well-ascertained fact shews the wonderful provision of Nature to fecundate eggs in cases where by the feuds of the larger males they might have been passed over. I have asked Mr Brown, the Secretary to our Literary and Antiquarian Society, to give me some Notes of some of his observations, which I will send you when he has leisure to give them.8
Our Ova is just about hatching, and if you wish it, I could send you specimens of fish in their earliest stage, and some of them in their second and third year now in the Ponds, both of which of the latter, second and third year, will go off to the sea in the course of next month as smelts,9 and some of them will return as grilses weighing from 3 to 7 lbs before the end of August.— I may further mention that while the males 18 months old are sufficient to impregnate full grown ova, the sac of the eggs of female fish of the same hatching can only be discovered as a
CD annotations
Footnotes
Bibliography
Brown, William. 1862. The natural history of the salmon, as ascertained by the recent experiments in the artificial spawning and hatching of the ova and rearing of the fry, at Stormontfield, on the Tay. Glasgow: Thomas Murray and Son.
Buist, Robert. 1866. The Stormontfield piscicultural experiments. 1853–1856. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas.
Columbia gazetteer of the world: The Columbia gazetteer of the world. Edited by Saul B. Cohen. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998.
Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.
Descent: The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. By Charles Darwin. 2 vols. London: John Murray. 1871.
Doak, Wade. 1972. Fishes of the New Zealand region. Auckland, New Zealand: Hodder and Stoughton.
Nicols, Arthur. 1882. The acclimatisation of the Salmonidae at the Antipodes: its history and results. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington.
OED: The Oxford English dictionary. Being a corrected re-issue with an introduction, supplement and bibliography of a new English dictionary. Edited by James A. H. Murray, et al. 12 vols. and supplement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1970. A supplement to the Oxford English dictionary. 4 vols. Edited by R. W. Burchfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1972–86. The Oxford English dictionary. 2d edition. 20 vols. Prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989. Oxford English dictionary additional series. 3 vols. Edited by John Simpson et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993–7.
Summary
Replies to CD on salmon: the pugnacity of males and the proportions of sexes. [see Descent 1: 308, 2: 3.]
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-5984
- From
- Robert Buist
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- Perth
- Source of text
- DAR 86: A17–18
- Physical description
- inc †
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 5984,” accessed on 23 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-5984.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 16