81 
cesses. Last year the attempt was made to draw a com- 
parison between stocking a stream with fish and raising an 
orchard, and with the parallel but half drawn it looked 
rather adverse to the yearling idea; but had the parallel 
been carried to its legitimate conclusion we would have 
seen that the young trees to thrive were in constant need 
of attention and protection. Food, water and protection 
from enemies all young trees must have, or only the fittest 
survive. Forgetting or ignoring these fundamental prin- 
ciples of husbandry, it was concluded that because one 
could raise large trees from small ones, therefore one could 
to the best advantage stock wild waters with infant fish. 
There is no true simile at any point between the two pro- 
cesses. In the former case we domesticate the trees, and 
in the latter case we naturalize the fish. These are widely 
divergent processes, in so much that in naturalization we 
omit, or at least, do not extend, the protection always ac- 
companying domestication. A fair comparison cannot be 
drawn between the two. A fairer comparison might be 
found in the colonization by man of new countries. Who 
among the advocates of infant fry planting would support 
a scheme for colonizing a new America by sending out a 
cargo of babies? Let us look at this simile and see if it 
won’t parallel better than that of the orchard. The his- 
tory of the early colonization of this continent and Aus- 
tralia contains accounts of the death from disease, enemies 
and murder by savages sometimes of entire communities. 
Truly these were ‘‘ lambs placed in the lion’s den for safe- 
keeping,’’? somewhat on the order recounted (page 83, 
twenty-first meeting) of planting two-pound lake trout in 
a lake infested by pickerel. The moral is, if you will put 
your lambs into lions’ dens, don’t think it strange if others 
put their sheep into a sheepfold. But, further, we see 
that wherever on proper lines colonization has been under- 
taken, success has crowned the effort, and so it will eventu- 
ally prove in the naturalization of fish. 
wa 
