FISH CULTURE — PROFITS OF. 229 



What is most desired now is the best protection to all the rivers and the streams 

 of the State. The real fish interests of Indiana are what I most desire to see pre- 

 served inviolate, notwithstanding that they have been tampered with and rendered 

 well nigh past redemption. 



If the tax-payer only knew it, it would be to his interest to render all the aid 

 possible to protect the fishes we have with us, not caring how many of strange var- 

 iety may be introduced. Let our streams once be depopulated, and it will take 

 hundreds of thousands of dollars to restock them. Do the tax-payers ever think 

 of this? A few more years of depredation by the seiners and dynamiters and the 

 rivers and streams of Indiana will be as useless as a barren waste. 



But I will not weary you. I will close these desultory remarks with a little 

 poem by one whom I knew and loved, T. Buchanan Read. It does not indeed, 

 refer to the fish interests of Indiana, but it is a pretty pen picture dear to the 

 heart of the amateur fisherman : 



" The angler stands 

 Swinging his rod with skillful hands; 

 The fly at the end of his gossamer line 

 Swings through the sun like a summer moth, 

 Till, dropped with a careful precision fine 

 It touches the pool beyond the froth. 

 A-sudden, the speckled hawk of the brook 

 Darts from his covert and seizes the hook. 

 Swift spins the reel ; with easy slip 

 The line pays out, and the rod like a whip, 

 Lithe and arrowy, tapering, slim. 

 Is bent to a bow o'er the brooklet's brim, 

 Till the trout leaps up in the sun, and flings 

 The spray from the flash of his finny wings; 

 But he dies wiih the hues of the morning light, 

 While his sides with a cluster of stars are bright. 

 — The angler in his basket lays 

 The constellation — and goes his ways." 



FISH CULTURE, AISTD THE PRO FITS OF IT.* 



BY HON. ISAAC N. COTTON, OF TRADER'S POINT. 



" The past has its uses, but it is no place for a man to live." 

 In the past fish culture in the United States has been very limited, both in 

 theory and practice, but there seems to be a new day dawning for the fish as an ar- 

 ticle of culture for food. The General Government and many of the States have 

 Fish Commissioners, but the result of their labor has only commenced to reach the 



*An address delivered before the State and Delegate Boards of Agriculture at their 

 annual meeting January 8, 1885. 



