REARING THE YOUNG FRY. 155 



Their digestive organs are wonderfully active, and 

 they will digest* almost as fast as you can feed them, 

 and you will need a good deal of patience to feed till 

 they refuse to eat. I never knew any healthy young 

 fry of mine to decline eating but once, and then I had 

 them fed incessantly for two hours, at the end of 

 which time they gave up beaten. The young fry will 

 repay you well for feeding them well, for there is 

 hardly any creature which shows the effects of good 

 feeding so quickly and strikingly as young trout. They 

 appear sometimes to grow, almost like flies, on ample 

 allowance, and one or two good meals will make a 

 hungry young trout seem to double his bulk, and this 

 is not wholly an illusion either. But although they 

 are not likely to eat too much, they will not only at 

 this age, but at all ages, take too large pieces of food at 

 a time, and will sometimes kill themselves in this way. 

 When you find a trout dead, with his head much 

 swollen laterally, and both eyes forced outwards, you 

 may know that he killed himself by bolting his food. 



We have said nothing so far in this chapter about 

 removing the young fry from the hatching troughs, 

 and, indeed, this removal is not necessary for a week 

 or two. The young fry will do as well in the hatch- 

 ing troughs, if the water is raised an inch or two, as 

 anywhere else at first, but they must be thinned out 

 very soon after they begin to feed. If you engage in 



* Bertram compares the digestion of some fishes' stomachs to 

 the action of fire. Harvest of the Sea, p. 



Lyman says of pickerel, that they are " mere machines for the 

 assimilation of other organisms." Mass. Fisheries, Report, 

 1871, p. 17. 



