158 BOOK OF THE BLACK BASS. 



otlier parties have been accredited with the praiseworthy 

 act who had nothing whatever to do with it, and whom I 

 will not even niention here, it may not seem out of place 

 to give the subject a little more space in this connection. 



The earliest reference to the matter, of which I have 

 any knowledge, is contained in a letter describing tiie hab- 

 its of the Black Bass, written by Mr. John Eoff, of Wheel- 

 ing, West A-^irginia, and published in the Rej)ort of the 

 Smithsonian Institution for 1854, and is as follows : — 



"Mr. William Shriver, a gentleman of this place, and 

 son of the late David Shriver, Esq., of Cumberland, Mary- 

 land, thinking the Potomac River admirably suited to the 

 cultivation of the Bass, has commenced the laudable un- 

 dertaking of stocking that river with them; he has already 

 taken, this last season, some twenty or more in a live box, 

 in the water-tank on the locomotive, and placed them in 

 the canal basin at Cumberland, where we are in hopes they 

 will expand and do well, and be a nucleus from which the 

 stock will soon spread." 



General Shriver, himself, in a letter to Philip T. Tyson, 

 of Baltimore, Agricultural Chemist of Maryland, in Sep- 

 tember, 1860, says: — 



*' * * * The enterprise or experiment was contemplated 

 by me long before the completion of the Baltimore and 

 Ohio Railroad to the Ohio River at Wheeling, but no 

 satisfactory mode of transportation presented itself to my 

 mind until after the comj)letion of the great work (in, I 

 believe, the year 1853), and in the following year I made 

 my first trip (although I made several afterwards in the 

 same year), carrying with me my first lot offish in a large 

 tin bucket, perforated, and which I made to fit the open- 

 ing in the water-tank attached to the locomotive, which 



