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patient and kind manner in which you have listened to my 

 Paper, and I trust that some of the facts I have given you 

 in connection with a subject which is really of vast import- 

 ance to many thousands of anglers, viz., the increase of our 

 sport-affording coarse fish, will counterbalance to some 

 extent the deficiency of my Paper in other respects. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. J. C. BLOOMFIELD said, coming from Ireland, he 

 should like to say a word or two upon this matter. Like 

 the Chairman he had been for many years endeavouring all 

 he possibly could to protect fish ; and possibly there might 

 be some present who had come across, at Lough Erne, in 

 the north of Ireland, the results of his labours. He had 

 been a salmon and trout fisher himself, and no one would 

 wish to associate them with such fish as they were dealing 

 with to-day. But he agreed with Mr. Marston that you 

 could not touch anything that was of more importance to 

 the country than this coarse fish question. In this country 

 there were a vast number of poor people who visited the 

 different ponds and small rivers for the purpose of angling, 

 and no one would grudge them the pleasure and the ex- 

 hilaration they would feel on those occasions, and which they 

 appreciated all the more from the confined nature of their 

 occupation during so many months of the year. The 

 salmon fisherman who knew what it was to have a twenty- 

 pound fish at the end of his line must be a churl if he 

 would not like to see a ten-pound pike at the end of the 

 line of his poorer brother. He had in his mind's eye a 

 spot in the north of Ireland where, from one hill, you had 

 a view of twenty-seven mountain lakes all containing pike, 



