70 Book of the Black Bass. 



which comparatively barren waters may be stocked to a con- 

 siderable extent with good food-fishes, and they exhibit the general 

 interest and attention that have been given to this mode of 

 propagation." 



In the account above given, reference is made to the 

 stocking of the Potomac Eiver with black bass by Gen- 

 eral W. W. Shriver, of Wheeling, West Virginia. As this 

 matter is often alluded to on account of the marvelous in- 

 crease of the fish from so small a beginning — less than 

 thirty bass having been originally transplanted — and as 

 other parties have been accredited with the praiseworthy 

 act who had nothing whatever to do with it, and whom I 

 will not even mention here, it may not .seem out of place 

 to give the subject a little more space in this connection. 



The earliest reference to the matter, of which I have 

 any knowledge, is contained in a letter describing the hab- 

 its of the black bass, written by Mr. John EofE, of Wheel- 

 ing, West Virginia, and published in the Eeport of the 

 Smithsonian Institution for 1854, and is as follows: 



" Mr. William Shriver, a gentleman of this place, and son of the 

 late David Shriver, Esq., of Cumberland, Maryland, thinking the 

 Potomac River admirably suited to the cultivation of the bass, 

 has commenced the laudable undertaking of stocking that river 

 with them ; he has already taken, this last season, some twenty or 

 more in a live-box, in the water-tank on the locomotive, and 

 placed them in the canal basin at Cumberland, where we are in 

 hopes they will expand and do well, and be a nucleus from which 

 the stock will soon spread." 



Greneral Shriver, himself, in a letter to Philip T. Tyson, 

 of Baltimore, Agricultural Chemist of Maryland, in Sep- 

 tember, 1860, says: 



" * * * The enterprise or experiment was contemplated by 

 me long before the completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad 

 to the Ohio River at Wheeling, but no satisfactory mode of trans- 



