134 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



Mr. Hodges. That is rather a difficult question to answer. 

 It depends a good deal on the character of your soil. The 

 soil where I built my ponds was rocky, and it cost me five 

 times as much to dig out the rocks and get the ponds ready 

 as I expected it would. If you have good digging, you can 

 fix your hatching-house and the pond in the hatching-house, 

 and two ponds outside, for five hundred dollars, probably, all 

 in nice shape, ready to receive the fish. If you have hard 

 digging, and have to spend two or three months in blasting 

 rocks, it will cost yon more. Mr. Kiraberley, of Goshen, can 

 tell you about blasting rocks better than I can. 



Mr. Sedgwick. It seems to me that this question of trout- 

 breeding is one that ought to interest every farmer who has a 

 trout-brook on his farm. It is a fact that in Litchfield County 

 the trout have decreased. I can remember as a boy going to 

 streams near my place and catching good strings of trout, but 

 now it is almost impossible to get any. In my particular 

 locality, people have taken pains, several times, to get some 

 of the young fry and put them in our streams, but as yet I do 

 not observe that it has had any effect on the increase of the 

 fish, and it has occurred to me that one reason of the lack of 

 fish is our drouths in summer, which tend to increase the 

 temperature of the water, and another reason is, the increase 

 of floods. 



In this connection, the fact is of interest to us as farmers, 

 that the fish in our ponds, the little lakes that we have 

 scattered around tlu^ough the State, have also decreased, 

 partly from the fact that manufacturing industries have been 

 established on the streams which supply these ponds, and 

 empty into them a mass of deleterious matters which are 

 poisonous to the fish, and partly to the fact that the mistaken 

 idea has prevailed that the fish would increase by stocking 

 these ponds with black bass. It seem to me that the stocking 

 of our ponds in Litchfield County with black bass has done 

 more to drive out other fish than anything else that has ever 

 been done. Why, sir, they are the meanest fish to catch that 

 were ever put into a pond, or to eat after you have caught 



