TROUT BREEDING. 75 



December, and are more nutritious as well as more natural 

 food, than any I have mentioned. It is true, that many 

 persons would be disgusted at the idea of eating so beauti- 

 ful and delicious a fish as a trout, fed on maggots. Does 

 it ever occur to us what a hog eats, when we have sausages 

 or broiled ham for breakfast? or what trout feed on in 

 their natural haunts ? An inventory of a trout's stomach, 

 I have often found, would exhibit rather a heterogeneous 

 assortment, not omitting a few green caterpillars, and 

 numberless maggots hatched from the eggs of such flies as 

 deposit them for incubation in waters that are natural 

 homes for trout. If these diminutive larvae give growth 

 and flavor to trout in wild streams, what would the plump 

 offspring of green flies do, if fed to them in stock ponds ? 

 I have found them to be taken with as much gusto as green 

 turtle was taken by London aldermen in olden times, and 

 they no doubt produce the same aldermanic proportions. 

 From my own experience, I would say that ten pounds of 

 beef's liver produces more than that weight of maggots. If 

 boxes are provided, with bottoms of woven wire sufficiently 

 open to allow the larvae to drop through when shaken, and 

 sliding board bottoms to detain them as they are hatched 

 out, these boxes may be kept as worm-producers in some 

 out-of-the-way place, and taken to the pond and shaken, 

 after removing the sliding bottom. Seth Green finds the 

 head of a beef productive in this way, dipping it in the 

 water and shaking the larvae off" to his fish, and setting it 

 away in a box to produce more. An -old friend, who takes 

 an interest in all that pertains to trout-breeding, discourses 



