“In my garden,” said a resident of Brookline, “I dug last fall a hole three feet deep, thirty feet long and thirty feet wide. I filled the hole with water—I made an artificial lake out of it. Today that artificial lake is full of fish. Where did they come from? I didn’t put them there.”
    “The question you ask me,” replied the biologist, “has been asked me many times before. Innumerable men, building artificial lakes, have, like you, been mystified to find these lakes spontaneously producing hosts of fish.
    “This is the secret of the matter. Fish-eating birds, the gull and hawk, and so on, settle on these new waters, drop into them from their bills fish-spawn—the crumbs, so to speak, of a recent meal—and these crumbs propagate, become fish. Thus, in time, we have an apparent miracle—an artificial lake spontaneously producing hundreds of finny denizens.”

From— The Evening Statesman. (Walla Walla, Wash.), 05 April 1905. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.