398 



The National Geographic Magazine 



and its fishermen have for years been 

 reaping a golden harvest, finding a ready 

 sale in the west and also sending large 

 consignments to New York in special 

 cars. The next important center is the 

 western end of Lake Erie, in Ohio and 

 Michigan, where large special ponds 

 have been constructed and a peculiar 

 form of cultivation has sprung up. The 

 ponds are designed primarily for retain- 

 ing carp that have been seined in open 

 waters until the price warrants shipment, 

 and some of them have to be kept at a 

 proper level by pumping or by the use of 

 water elevators. The expense involved 

 in the construction and maintenance of 

 such works shows how remunerative the 

 carp is. Other important carp states are 

 Colorado, Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, 

 Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ten- 

 nessee, Utah, and Wisconsin. 



It is not as a great market fish, how- 

 ever, that the carp is destined to attain 

 its highest importance among us, but as a 

 fish for private culture and home con- 

 sumption. The number of farmers and 

 small land-owners who are alive to the 

 benefits of private fish ponds is increas- 

 ■ ing at a very rapid rate, and hundreds of 

 thousands of such in all parts of the coun- 

 try, but particularly in the great central 

 region, will find in the carp the species 

 best adapted to their needs and condi- 

 tions. 



It is probable that the commercial 

 value of carp is insignificant compared 

 with its importance as a food for other 

 fishes. It is extensively eaten by many 

 of our most highly esteemed food fishes 

 and is the chief pabulum of some of them 

 in some places. In a number of the best 

 black-bass streams, like the Potomac and 

 the Illinois, the carp is very abundant 

 and is a favorite food of the young and 

 adult bass, while in California the intro- 

 duced striped bass has from the outset 

 subsisted largely on carp and may owe 

 its remarkable increase to the presence of 

 this food. 



The consumption of carp is certainly 

 destined to increase greatly ; but even if 

 the catch reaches no higher point, the 



introduction of the carp into the United 

 States will remain the leading achieve- 

 ment in fish acclimatization in recent 

 times, and, with the exception of the 

 original introduction of the same fish 

 into Europe from Asia, the most im- 

 portant the world has known. 



American anglers for bass and trout 

 and salmon, as a rule, have only con- 

 tempt for the carp, and there is nothing 

 so calculated to disturb the equanimity 

 of the otherwise amiable, disciples of 

 Walton as the mention of carp. It is my 

 firm conviction that the true basis for 

 most of the unfriendly feeling toward the 

 carp is the fact that this fish does not 

 habitually rise to a fly and is not fitted by 

 nature to inhabit the purling brook, the 

 foaming cataract, the glacier-fed rivers, 

 and the bottomless lakes where the fly- 

 caster is wont to go. And yet to hold 

 that the carp is beneath the attention of 

 sportsmen is to ignore well-known facts 

 and to acknowledge indifference to the 

 classical tenets of angling. From earliest 

 times the carp has been a favorite with 

 the anglers of Germany and England; 

 Isaac Walton himself devoted a chapter 

 to it, and called it "the queen of rivers; 

 a stately, a good, and a very subtile fish" ; 

 Cholmondeley-Pennell has shown that it 

 is at times as fastidious a biter as a trout 

 or bass ; and Professor Goode has pro- 

 tested against the dictum of New World 

 authorities in excluding from the class 

 of game fishes the carp, the dace, the 

 roach, and other pets of the father of 

 angling, classical in sportsmen's litera- 

 ture, and affording "sport, which in Eng- 

 land tens of thousands enjoy, to every 

 one who gets the chance to whip a salmon 

 or trout line over preserved waters." 



THB FAILURES 



In view of the foregoing splendid rec- 

 ord of achievement, we should not be 

 loath to acknowledge a number of fail- 

 ures to establish certain fishes and other 

 water creatures in regions in which they 

 were demanded and to which they ap- 

 peared to be entirely adapted. 



Between 1878 and 1888 five attempts 



