218 Thirty-Third Annual Meeting 
fish, but a few of them escaped. They got into our upper brook 
(which by the way is never stocked with large fish, only with 
fry), and a few years afterward we discovered that the upper 
brook fishing was falling off. The natural supposition was that 
the brook was being poached. Our game keepers were naturally 
indignant at that idea and said, “The poachers in that brook 
are brown trout.” I said, “How large have you seen them?” 
“Well, three or four pounds.” I told them to bring me some 
specimens if they could, and a few days afterwards they began 
bringing in brown trout which they either speared or shot at 
night, ranging from four to five pounds in weight, and almost 
all of them with brook trout of six or eight inches in length in- 
side of them. Since then we have made a strong effort to get 
rid of these fish. It is almost impossible to discover them in the 
daytime, particularly in the summer time, because they hide 
away under the banks, but last year and the year before we killed 
a great many of them on the spawning beds, some of them run- 
ning as high as eight pounds in weight, this in a brook that is 
inhabited by brook trout which will run not over a quarter of a 
pound in weight. Within the last two weeks I have discovered 
that some of those fish are still in our preserves. The symptoms 
in our preserves are different from those described by the gentle- 
man from New York—the trout simply disappear—when, as 
occurred about three weeks ago, a brown trout weighing fifteen 
pounds was shot in a preserve that contained about 5,000 two- 
year-old fish, a gentleman made a calculation, assuming that 
that fish was ten years old, and that he ate only one fish a day, 
that he would have consumed 3,650 fish in ten years time, which 
would account for a very large mortality in that particular pre- 
serve. (Laughter.) I will not take up your time longer, but I 
feel that everything that was said the other day in regard to the 
German carp could be said with greater truth in regard to the 
German brown trout. (Applause. ) 
