48 AMERICAN ANGLER'S BOOK 



When the temperature of the air is below sixtj-five, it is 

 very easy to wrap a Eoach or Chub of six inches long, in a 

 wet handkerchief, and bring it home alive. White Perch, 

 Lahrax pallidus, taken towards sundown in cool weather, if 

 placed carefully in a basket, will live more than an hour, and 

 be as lively in a few minutes in a tub of hydrant w^ter as in 

 the river. 



A friend assured me that once, when a boy, during a driz- 

 zling rain, he got up into a cherry tree, and in order to keep 

 his string of Catfish, which he had lately caught, from the 

 depredations of some hogs beneath, he took them up also, 

 while he got his fill of cherries, and that he forgot his fish 

 in his hurried departure, but found on going back for them 

 the same afternoon, that they were nearly all alive, and evinced 

 it by flapping their tails. Here was an instance of fish living 

 out of water with a switch thrust through one of their gills. 



It is stated on good authority, that in Germany, Carp are 

 even kept in a basket or net in a damp cellar, through winter, 

 with the snout protruding through wet moss, and fed with 

 crumbs of bread, and fattened after the manner of cramming 

 poultry. 



In China, the spawn of fish is a regular article of traffic, 

 and is exported from one part of the country to another, after 

 being impregnated with the milt. 



It is an established fact, that on draining Carp ponds in 

 Germany, to cultivate the soil, which had been flooded and 

 made a fish-pond of, for the purpose of enriching it, that the 

 spawn of the Carp, left after drawing off the water, does not 

 lose its vitality, though exposed for two or three years to 

 the heat of summer and frost of winter ; and that, when the 

 field is again converted into a pond, there is no necessity for 

 restocking it with Carp, but the ova remaining beneath the 



