126 Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting. 
Some Small Mouth Bass have been planted in the lower 
river, and, of course, from time to time, have come down from 
the Upper River in floods or wanderlust, but they are unsuited 
to these quieter waters and muddy bottoms, and are not plenty 
like their cousins, just as the Large Mouth has in later years 
occasionally been placed in the upper reaches, but do not find it 
congenial since by then the Carp had found a lodgement in the 

pools where the Large Mouth Bass might have made a home 
and he left in disgust. 
The Carp cannot drive the Bass out or disturb his nest (he 
does not eat the bass spawn, as it is stuck to a gravel so tight 
he’d have to bolt a ton of pebbles for a pound of jelly) ; the Carp 
with his velvet sucker mouth is about as bloodthirsty and fero- 
cious as the rabbit, and probably fights the same way by butting. 
while the bass will tackle anything that approaches his gravel- 
pan. This assertion is made without any pretense of superior 
information—but a conviction born of years of observation— 
that all the stories of Carp eating bass spawn are pipe dreams— 
and somebody may sometime prove 

sometimes dreams come true 
that Carp are fond of bass nest soup, and then I shall be in the 
position of the listener whose friend telling a miraculous yarn 
wound up by saying “I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I 
hadn’t seen it; and who retorted: “Then, you of course, will 
pardon me.” But while the Carp cannot disturb the Bass spawn- 
beds, his digging in the mud and clouding the water does dis- 
cust the Bass as it does the bait on which he feeds and any other 
self-respecting denizen of the pools, and the Carp soon has the 
mud to himself. While what I have to say is assumed to be in 
the interest of everyone who takes fish with an angle, without 
regard to lure, my own preference is for the artificial fly—and 
though making no claims to any superiority for that way of 
and admitting as much skill and pleasure—and 
and though under many condi- 


taking fish 

science in the other methods 
tions of cloudy water or deep, the fly is useless—none other 
appeals to me; and with that introduction I desire to proclaim— 
what many people will consider a heresy—that in his season the 
Large Mouth Bass is better sport than the Small Mouth Bass 
from the warm waters of the Potomac or the chilly waters of 
