LIVE-BAITING. 149 



The pond is always drawn and gets nearly dry for at least ten 

 days before it is again filled and fresh stocked. How many times 

 this jack escaped the nets of the wading men I have no idea ; but 

 the Verwaller (bailiff) of the estate assured me that just eighteen 

 years ago this tank or pond lay quite dry for the whole winter and 

 spring till harvest and they made hay on the dry ground, after- 

 wards it was filled and stocked again. 



At whatever rate, however, the pike grows, whether rapidly 

 or slowly, the one point beyond dispute is that he does grow, 

 and that to a size which, when he is suffered to attain to his 

 full development, would probably astonish this sceptical age of 

 anglers, who will scarcely believe even in Mr. Alfred Jardine's 

 twenty- and thirty-pounders, although produced in evidence, 

 both cast and stuffed at the Fisheries' Exhibition. So far as 

 this species is concerned, the exhibition of casts of fish by Mr. 

 Jardine and others, few as they were numerically, sounded, I 

 believe, the death knell of taxidermy. 



In all that constitutes the perfection of simulation or the art 

 of making the unreal appear as the real, casting is immeasur- 

 ably ahead of fish-stuffing. You have, in fact, the exact repre- 

 sentation of the fish, scale for scale, as he appeared fresh out of 

 the water, in full length and unshrunken proportions. With a 

 stuffed fish, on the contrary, neither his length nor his girth is 

 ever really accurate. Fish vertebrae are separated by a sort 

 of gelatinous substance, forming a separation between the 

 several joints, which, after a short time, becomes desiccated 

 or dried up, thus contracting the several bones and shortening 

 not inconsiderably, the total length. A similar shrinking pro- 

 cess, though from somewhat different causes, takes place in the 

 girth. The colouring also in the cast is that of the fish just 

 after his decease 



Before decay's effacing fingers 



Have swept the lines where beauty lingers. 



And last, not least, the fish-casting is practically inde- 

 structible by time, and does not cause the disagreeable smell 

 produced by the old mummified specimens of the art of the 



