56 



good breakfast on liver. There is a kind of sportsmen 

 who go into the streams and get wild tront — I have 

 myself gone into the woods hnngr}- enongh to eat a 

 jackass, and cooked my own tront and eaten it half 

 raw, and declared that it was the finest tront ever 

 cooked on the face of the earth — bnt if a man ever 

 served it to me in a New York restanrant, it wonld be 

 sent back. I have eaten tront fed on liver that I con- 

 sider good tront. 



Mr. Titcomb : I have been interested in the re- 

 marks on the snbject of natnral food for tront, and on 

 the subject of marketing trout. I have been interested 

 in a hatchery unfortunatel}- so situated that at certain 

 seasons of the 3^ear the water is more like mud than 

 water ; bnt I have found that if the eggs of the trout 

 and the fry be carried be3'Ond the sacking period, the 

 mud is full of food for them. 



I have not experimented as Mr. Mather has in con- 

 fining the fish and getting at the actual suppl}' of food. 

 I could only gather my knowledge from the action of 

 the fish themselves. The stream I refer to flows in a 

 valley for a long distance, and has the water shed from 

 both sides, and it seems to get all the fertilizer which 

 is put on the farms above the station, and therefore in 

 a wa}' the fish get the natural insect food, but there 

 would be days, you might say a week at a time, when 

 the water would be so impure, so roily, that the little 

 fish could hardly be seen. During these periods it did 

 not seem necessar3^ at all to feed them. They did not 

 seem to care for the artificial food, but were lively, 

 keeping up toward the head of the stream as if all the 

 time on the alert for food, natural food, and I found 

 that they thrived in that wa}' nicely. 



I feel very much as Mr. Mather does, that this 

 Cjuestion has not been solved, and that we must make 

 a study of it in the future ; but from my experience in 

 the plant referred to, I am in hopes that it will be 



