202 Thirty-Third Annual Meeting 
of themselves, and I rather fancy that if they are going to do 
well in eastern waters they will do well there. Again these chaps 
that I have already put in there may turn up. 
[ have noticed that from time to time the natural course of 
my brook gets diverted, through becoming jammed up with 
debris, and every spring I clear it out and restore it to its original 
course, now and then fashioning out little places that have been 
choked up with sand, going underneath the bank and making 
cool places for the small fish to lie in, preserving, as I say, the 
original course of the stream, making tiny falls wherever I can, 
thus increasing the oxygen in the water, and oxygen means life. 
I scoop out and take advantage of sandy places. 
However in one respect I have interfered with nature, for in 
one place I have turned the natural place of the brook in a 
meadow through which it flows, taking it out of its proper course 
here where it used to run down by gravity, swinging it around 
to one side and thus securing more stream and a better spawning 
place and a sharper fall from it just before it goes into the pond. 
That is the only place where I have interfered, if you may so call 
it, with nature, and I think I have gained by having more feet 
of brook, and I now have a place where I hope some of these 
fishes are going to spawn this fall. 
There is no pretension in the little specimens I hand around 
to you (showing two specimens mounted on boards—rainbow 
trout nine and three-fourths inches long, brook trout seven 
and three-fourths inches long) of anything except to show 
you the approximate length of these two fishes. The gor- 
geous coloring of our brook trout (which caused a poet to 
say that when they sprang into being the rainbow smiled), and 
of its companion, the western charr, who has belted himself with 
the same prismatic colors, is lost in these specimens, because the 
skins have been in pickle, and I did not try to have them 
mounted or painted because I wanted to show you merely the 
relative sizes of these fish. I tried to get you specimens exactly 
alike, but it was an impossible task. If I throw a fly now the 
little fellows come so rapidly, particularly small trout, that it is 
very hard work to get a larger specimen, and I did not care to 
risk getting the fishes in a net because I do not like to handle 
them any more than is absolutely necessary. 
