62 Fish Culturists" Association. 



I not known the man who caught them, I should have thought 

 he had taken them out of some stream. 



I feel that I ought to say something about brook-trout and 

 the laws regulating their sale. I am in favor of the most 

 stringent laws preventing the sale of brook -trout out of season, 

 but I do not think you ought to frame those laws so as to 

 embrace innocent persons. I went, with two other gentlemen, 

 to Albany in the early part of last year, when the Legislature 

 was in session, and when the Game Club were endeavoring to 

 make the law more stringent, in order to have the law so framed 

 that a person proving that he had no guilty intent in having in 

 his possession brook-trout out of season, should not be punished 

 with a fine. My reason for taking such an active course in this 

 matter was this : our President will probably recollect the 

 circumstance, for I addressed him a communication at the time. 

 A party in Newcastle sent to me, on the first day of March last, 

 some boxes of brook-trout, genuine salmo fontinalis, he laboring 

 under the impression that our laws enabled the sale of brook- 

 trout after the first of March. The first notice I had of the 

 trout was that some boxes were landed at my stalls in the 

 market, looking like boxes of smelts ; I took a hammer and 

 knocked off the cover, and found there brook-trout enough 

 to amount to a fine of about $75,000. I was bothered to know 

 what I should do. Had there been one of the informers of the 

 Game Society there, who keep us poor fishermen under such 

 constant supervision, and had he seen those trout, I would, 

 under the law, have been found guilty of having trout in my 

 possession out of season, and I should have been liable to a 

 fine for each and every fish. I erased my name from the boxes 

 immediately and set them out on the sidewalk, and when asked 

 about them, I did not know to whom they belonged. Then 

 I employed an expressman to take them back to the steamboat 



