Fish and Fishermen 239 



fomla to bring joy to the hearts and beauty to the eyes of 

 many more sportsmen than could ever have seen them in 

 their very limited native habitat. 



Few people realize how great an extent of excellent trout 

 water in North America was barren of fish before the white 

 man came, particularly in the rugged, geologically new, 

 western part of the continent. Here glaciation had created 

 numberless lakes so high in the mountains that they were 

 inaccessible to fish; introduction of trout has created fishing 

 where there would otherwise be none. Strange to say, it is 

 the imported eastern brook which has given the best results 

 in many such lakes. The reasons are two. The eastern brooks 

 are natives of colder regions than the other species, and 

 therefore grow faster in these high lakes with their short 

 summers, long ice-bound winters, and correspondingly cold 

 water. And they are, as we have seen, capable of spawning 

 successfully in spring seepages, and thus are able to propa- 

 gate themselves in these lakes without tributaries, where the 

 other species would have to be maintained by restocking. In 

 contrast, the rainbows of the west have replaced the brooks 

 in some of the eastern streams which have been rendered 

 uninhabitable for the aborigines by the increased water tem- 

 peratures brought about by deforestation and erosion; and 

 the European brown has proved better able than either of 

 the Americans to stand up against the pollution, crowding, 

 and other human activities which help turn the wheels of 

 progress. 



The second phase in the way of man with trout derived 

 from the fact that for many years many men believed that 

 natural spawning was highly inefficient. Someone had blun- 

 dered. Someone had gone off on the wrong track, and all the 

 others had followed blindly. Someone had misinterpreted 

 what he saw, and all the others had accepted, and had come 

 to the belief that the tail-flapping of the female which we 



