460 AMERICAN ANGLEE'S BOOK. 



its dyestuff ; and the tannery fouling the clear stream, covering 

 the bottom of the pools and the spawn-beds with its leached 

 bark, and killing the fish by hundreds with the noxious dis- 

 charge of its lime- vat. Any law against such vandalism in 

 the United States is seldom or but feebly enforced. 



We are also disgusted occasionally by hearing persons, 

 who pretend to be 1 sportsmen, boast of the number of Trout 

 they have taken by unfair means. I was once present when 

 a person of this kind, who had just returned from an excur- 

 sion to the head waters of the Oroton for woodcock, told 

 how he had snared a hundred Trout, each a foot long, on their 

 spawning-bed. To use his own vernacular, he would have 

 "punched a fellow's head," who would trap a partridge or 

 kill her on her nest. Which of the two is the more dastardly 

 act ? When fishing Jessup Eiver in Hamilton County, New 

 York, some years ago, the guide pointed out a place at the 

 mouth of a little brook, where a snob deer-hunter from Troy, 

 the September previous, with a bass-rod and a red hackle, 

 lifted out sixty pounds of Trout, which had collected there to 

 spawn. If time-serving legislators have not the independence 

 to pass laws for a more thorough protection of Trout, or officials 

 do not enforce those that are passed, the fly-fisher at no 

 distant day will have to go hundreds of miles farther than 

 he does now, to find them. But unless I should appear to be 

 travelling out of my way in condemnation of such means and 

 such persons as I have alluded to, I will proceed with my 

 observations on fish-breeding ; giving first a few suggestive 

 remarks on fish-ponds, the manner of stocking them, and of 

 producing the young fish in the natural way; and then 

 describe at length the mode which has been adopted, within 

 a few years past, of hatching the eggs and rearing the young 

 fish to a certain age by artificial means. ' 



In many parts of Europe, and in China, where fresh sea- 



