38o THE DRY-FLY MAN'S HANDBOOK 



to purchase wild fish either from his own or from some 

 other river for stocking purposes, there is one and only 

 one possible means of their being procured, and that is 

 by their being poached. In other words, he will buy 

 from the poachers or their agents fish which have been 

 illegally taken from other waters in the neighbourhood, 

 or possibly even from his own, and he will in effect 

 constitute himself a receiver of goods which, according 

 to the extraordinary anomaly of the law, are not stolen 

 but are clearly improperly obtained. 



The second is an insuperable objection to the plan of 

 attempting to stock with wild fish. In a fishery I man- 

 aged there were two or three places where the number of 

 trout always appeared to me too numerous, and there 

 were other parts of the water lower down where the 

 stock was evidently insufficient. We netted some of the 

 overstocked reaches, put all the trout into cans and 

 sent them down the stream in carts distances varying 

 from three miles for some of them to as much as five 

 miles for others. The experiment was on quite a large 

 scale, and no less than 2283 wild trout were moved in 

 this way and distributed among reaches lower down 

 the same river. This work was carried out in the 

 month of October, and the next spring we were sur- 

 prised to find that the stock of fish in the lower reaches 

 had not increased to any great extent, nor had we 

 succeeded in reducing the number in the upper reaches. 

 This is what invariably happens when wild fish are 

 introduced or moved from one part of a fishery to 

 another. They never seem to make themselves at 



