30 FISH-CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
NN 
them into the warmer surface water during the warmest month 
in the year. Besides one only required the use of his eyes to 
see that the trout taken from the lake were in poor condition as 
compared to trout from more favored waters. In our interior 
lakes, whitefish seem to be pre-eminently the food for lake trout. 
They will not take the hook, and as the law forbids the use of 
nets, they have only to multiply to do good to their conscience 
and fellow fish. Inhabiting, as they do, the deeper waters of the 
lakes with the trout, the young whitefish come to the surface 
only where the water is deep, and at a season when other fish 
cannot utilize them as food. Undoubtedly they are sacrificed to 
the appetite of other fish at spawning time, but they do not con- 
tribute to this demand in a manner to destroy their usefulness 
as trout food. I never yet have found a whitefish inside of any 
fish but the lake trout, and I have examined the contents of the 
stomachs of hundreds of bass and pike taken in autumn from 
waters inhabited by whitefish. A species of whitefish has, since 
the memories of man, been found in greater or less quantities in 
the waters of Lake George, N. Y. 
Previous to the introduction of artificially hatched trout to 
this lake, the native trout were hardly in what is called good 
condition, and this state of affairs was unchanged until the New 
York State Fish Commission deposited 100,000 young whitefish 
(Coregonus clupetformis). Then the trout began to “take on fat,” 
until now I do not know of a lake in Eastern or Northern New 
York that can furnish such fine, fat lake trout as are taken from 
Lake George, and the whitefish are seen in myriads. 
The frost-fish, found in a few of the Adirondack waters, 
notably Blue Mountain and Raquette lakes, have been likened 
as fish food to the blue-back trout, that is supposed to be a prime 
factor in the immense growth of the Rangeley trout. The frost- 
fish—a species of whitefish, so said—is somewhat similar in its 
habits to the blue-back trout, resorting in great numbers in the 
fall—just before ice is formed on the lakes, hence the name—to 
the shallows and inlets for spawning purposes. They generally 
move in the night, and their numbers are so great that they 
make a noise as though the surface of the water was being 
threshed. They are in themselves a delicious food fish. Other 
