American Fisheries Society. 125 
figure—the wonder is, any are able to filter through the pounds 
and seines and drifts and dips that dispute their passage from the 
Capes to the Great Falls. Indeed, they would long since have 
disappeared as a commercial product of the Potomac but for the 
wonderful success of the fish culture, which this society does so 
well to encourage, and in which our Government beats the world. 
The Chinese, with their eggshells of fertilized spawn knew some 
tricks of their own before we moved over here, but in these days 
of railways when a carload of a million of fry may be sent to any 
corner of our country, eggshells of spawn sounds about as effec- 
tive as shooting elephants with firecrackers, or using a Hghtning 
bug for a searchlight. 
You are all famihar with the fact that the Small Mouth 
Black Bass were planted before the war, at Cumberland, on the 
Upper River, having been brought over the mountains from 
Wheeling Creek, in the tender of a locomotive; that the river 
was then full of suitable feed, and that the conditions which made 
the Potomac a dead line between the contestants, made angling 
for some years along its banks an unhealthy occupation, if there 
had been time to indulge in that pastime. As a consequence the 
fish spread as never did fish before or since—for never was so 
effective a close law anywhere else; one that threatened to pull 
a man’s cork under if he showed himself on either side, and when 
matters settled down and the riparian dwellers had leisure to try 
the river 

to evervbody’s astonishment—it was found to be teem- 
ing with bass. The official reports tell of how all the cities of the 
Jast were supphed from here 

the Susquehanna and other 
streams were stocked, and hundreds of fishermen found summer 
employment and revenue from their capture. Afterwards the 
efforts of distribution of black bass in my own State of Illinois, 
proved so successful that the government went into partnership 
with us, and have since supplied the world with stock mainly 
from this source, and since this fish resists artificial propagation 
the arrangement is a fortunate one. These are principally the 
Large Mouth Bass, and they have been placed in the tidewater 
Potomac, and the tributaries of that estuary, where they have 
wonderfully thriven, until, permit me to repeat, there is no Bass 
stream like it anywhere when the sun is clear, but there is a 
strange variability of the angler’s luck in this river. 
