American Fisheries Society. 127 



Dr. Parker : A kernel of corn will do very well for bait. 



Dr. Bartlett : A man who has been many years in my em- 

 ploy tells me that the best bait for a carp is a dovigh ball incor- 

 porated with cotton to make it firm, and that a potato fried, but. 

 not too crisply, is the next best bait. I have seen three hundred 

 and fift}^ peoj^le fishing at one time for carp with hook and line. 

 These fish make a big fight because you cannot drown them. 



Mr. Townsend : I brought with me a bundle of statistical 

 sheets of the Mississippi region and the Great Lakes region, and 

 if any members want them, they can have them. 



Mr. Titcomb : I wish to suggest some topics for considera- 

 tion at our next meeting. We get our calls for these meetings a 

 short time l)eforehand and are busy and do not think just what 

 we want to talk about. Now, on a recent trip I met a friend 

 who joined the society at this meeting, Mr. Parker of the province 

 of Quebec, and we traveled over thirty lakes in a canoe and caught 

 trout in every one of them. One of those lakes was eight miles 

 long and just teeming with trout. There seemed to be an abund- 

 ance of food and the conditions were just the same as in the 

 other lakes, and yet none of those trout that we caught there 

 would weigh over one-third of a jiound, and the average would 

 be about a fourth of a pound. The next lake might give you 

 trout which would average a pound, some of them going as high 

 as four pounds. Passing on to another lake you would get trout 

 the average of which as taken with the fly would be half a pound, 

 and another lake three-quarters. You could pass on to the last 

 lake and pick up trout at every cast in six to ten inches of water 

 with the waves a foot high so that the fish would jump right out 

 of the water and land on the sand if they did not happen to 

 catch your fly, and the fish would run about three to a pound. 

 Xow the question which I have raised and put in the form of a 

 topic is given here this way : 



"Given the same kind of water, food, etc., the same environ- 

 ment so far as appears from a superficial examination, why such 

 a great variation in the growth and average size of adult trout in 

 various lakes ?" 



There is one other question which comes up very often and 

 which I think has never been answered and I would like to see 



