ELEVENTH, ANNUAL REPORT: OL 
structions which follow will be of little use to those who suppose 
that the pond can be filled with fishes and left to take care of itself. 
To be made productive it will require intelligent care and consid- 
erable work. Those who are not interested to that extent may as 
well abandon the idea of raising fish and save the expense of 
stocking the pond. 
For the encouragement of those who are disposed to make a 
trial it may be stated with perfect fairness that food fishes can be 
raised with no more difficulty than chickens or vegetables. All 
persons who have experimented with the poultry yard and the 
garden know that they demand attention. A neglected fish-pond 
may be compared to a neglected garden, and will eventually reach 
the same gone-to-seed condition. 
The raising of trout is not considered in this connection: Trout 
require special conditions of water supply and temperature and 
there are already in existence many volumes on the subject of 
trout breeding. While it is a fish that most owners of ponds hope 
to cultivate, it is essentially one that can not be managed except 
under naturally favorable conditions, and it demands more atten- 
tion than it is likely to receive at the hands of the amateur. Trout 
culture is in active progress all over the land, and there are nu- 
merous commercial trout culturists from whom fry and yearlings 
may be purchased. Brown trout and rainbow trout, it should 
be stated, are more suitable for small lakes than brook trout, and 
will stand warmer water and grow considerably larger. The 
brook trout does not naturally inhabit waters having a tem- 
perature much above 60 degrees. 
With the ordinary run of ponds in the New York region, where 
the water becomes rather warm in summer, it is necessary to 
restrict the list of available fishes to the basses, perches, and 
sunfishes to which they are adapted. This paper therefore deals 
with the commoner fishes only. 
There are few sections of the country so lacking in native fishes 
that enough black bass, rock bass, yellow perch, white perch, 
crappie, blue-gill sunfish, long-eared sunfish, or catfish can not 
be procured for the purpose of stocking. 
State fish commissions can not usually furnish fishes for private 
waters, and much of the fish stock supplied by the national com- 
mission for private waters has, through ignorance on the part 
of the recipient, been lost, washed away by floods into public 
waters, or consumed when mature, without the conditions neces- 
sary to propagation having been supplied. 
Some of the above named pond-fishes occur in almost every 
