512 Sea -Trout Fishing. 



Your guide's statement of fact is correct, while he errs, as many a 

 wiser man has done, in attributing the effect to a primary instead of 

 a secondary cause. 



When once fairly in the current of fresh water, their movement 

 up-stream is very rapid. Passionless and almost sexless as the 

 mode of the nuptials they are on their way to complete may seem to 

 more highly organized beings, they drive with headlong eagerness 

 through torrent and foam, toward the shining reaches and gravelly 

 beds far up the river where their ova are to be deposited. The 

 females come first, afterward the males, and the earliest runs of the 

 fish always contain those of the largest size. For several days and 

 nights they continue passing swiftly, seldom lying many hours in the 

 same pool, never taking a backward stroke ; then all at once there 

 is a marked break in their streaming by, and the first run has gone 

 on. Another one soon follows, and they persevere successively 

 coming past till late in September, or even into October. All the 

 fish of any one run are of nearly the same weight, and they continue 

 decreasing in size with each successive run, until, as you descend 

 the river, only an occasional straggler over one or one and a half 

 pounds can be caught. On the California coast they, as well as the 

 salmon, are at least a month later in entering the rivers, which remain 

 during a great part of the summer too shallow and tepid to afford 

 them a safe abode, until a heavy rain -fall comes. 



These crowding refluent ranks are but a small proportion of 

 those that quitted their native streams for the sea. Thinned as they 

 are by voracious enemies there, and decimated again in shallower 

 waters by man's destroying devices, the amazing fecundity of migra- 

 tory fishes barely avails to maintain the annual supply. From some 

 coasts these fish have wholly disappeared. The people of the United 

 States are more destructive in this respect than any other. They man- 

 age these things better in the Dominion. There, the importance of the 

 fisheries as an object of commerce and a source of food, yielding for 

 these interests as they did, for instance, in 1875, over ten and a half 

 millions of dollars, has attracted legislative protection, through meas- 

 ures which it would be difficult to apply generally or efficiently in 

 our extended and democratic country. So far as the authority and 

 resources of the fish commissioners of the different States extend, 

 they are doing useful and honorable work which deserves the widest 



