278 STATE HOETICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



the tingling of every nerve, and the awakening of the dormant will to 

 "do" when first you saw a game fish rise to your cast ? A day so spent 

 gives one a renewed lease for another year of the fetid-sewerpoisened 

 air of our crowded civilization. To those of you who go fishing once 

 a year, I say go twice; and to those who go twice, go four times ; and 

 when you go, take your wives, your sisters and your children with 

 you. Let them drink in the fresh air of the woods, rest their tired 

 eyes on the green of the fields, catch the smaller and more exquisite 

 beauties of the mosses, lichens and flowers, watch the perfect beauty 

 of motion in the swelling wave and curling form, read "books in run- 

 ning brooks, sermons in stone and good in everything," and then go 

 back home to be better men and women for having worshiped God in 

 nature. 



There is another view of the inland fisheries which can be pre- 

 sented to you in a very few words, and one, I think, worthy of some 

 degree of consideration. It has been said that the native of Florda 

 lives in summer on mosquitoes and in winter on the Yankee who comes 

 to hunt and fish. This, like nearly all his brilliant tricks, was bor- 

 rowed by the Cracker from the Yank. In more than one of the East- 

 ern States it has been seriously urged that unless the fish and game 

 supplies of the backwood be maintained, the natives of those regions 

 would suffer for the want of the money scattered each year by the 

 summer tourist — that man of fancy rods and reels, whose few ounces 

 of fish we ridicule, and whose superabundance of health and energy 

 we envy. 



And there is yet another phase of fish culture which I feel justified 

 in bringing to your attention ; one which I am sure cannot be entirely 

 without interest to men of your calling ; that is the possibilities of 

 fish culture, combined with irrigation. There are unquestionably large 

 areas of even this well-watered State where the splendid benefits of 

 irrigation would be most material. In the irrigation ditches of Colorado 

 trout are grown at a merely nominal cost and sold in the markets of" 

 Denver at 50 cents a pound. Friends of mine in western Kansas have 

 demonstrated the advantages and comforts of farm fish culture, when 

 combined with irrigation. Common authorities have asserted that 

 irrigation can be so managed that the profits from the side issue of 

 fish culture would pay a handsome interest on the cost of the plant. 

 The fishes take nothing from the water themselves ; on the contrary, 

 in very many instances, they act as purifying agents. 1 once heard a 

 French gentlemen coin an apt term to describe his idea of the 

 sturgeon. In his pigeon English he called them "return Providence." 

 Looking below the surface we see that he meant the illy-contrived 



