460 AMERICAN ANGLER'S BOOK 



its dyestuff; and the tannery fouling che clear sfream, covering 

 the bottom of the pools and the spawn-beds with its leached 

 bark, and killing the fish by hundreds with the noxious dis- 

 charge of its lime- vat. Any law against such vandalism in 

 the United States is seldom or but feebly enforced. 



We are also disgusted occasionally by hearing persons, 

 who pretend to be sportsmen, boast of the number of Trout 

 they have taken by unfair means. I was once present when 

 a person of this kind, who had just returned from an excur- 

 sion to the head waters of the Croton for woodcock, told 

 how he had snared a hundred Trout, each a foot long, on their 

 spawning-bed. To use his own vernacular, he would have 

 "punched a fellow's head," who would trap a partridge or 

 kill her on her nest. Which of the two is the more dastardly 

 act ? When fishing Jessup Kiver in Hamilton County, New 

 York, some years ago, the guide pointed out a place at the 

 mouth of a little brook, where a snob deer-hunter from Troy, 

 the September previous, with a bass-rod and a red hackle, 

 lifted out sixty pounds of Trout, which had collected there to 

 spawn. If time-serving legislators have not the independence 

 to pass laws for a more thorough protection of Trout, or officials 

 do not enforce those that are passed, the fly-fisher at no 

 distant day will have to go hundreds of miles farther than 

 he does now, to find them. But unless I should appear to be 

 travelling out of my way in condemnation of such means and 

 such persons as I have alluded to, I will proceed with my 

 observations on fish-breeding ; giving first a few suggestive 

 remarks on fish-ponds, the manner of stocking them, and of 

 producing the young fish in the natural way; and then 

 describe at length the mode which has been adopted, within 

 a few years past, of hatching the eggs and rearing the young 

 fish to a certain age by artificial means. 



In many parts of Europe, and in China, where fresh sea- 



