VIVAEIA. 47 



would be to retract your hand in time, when they had 

 got the bait ; we only remember one more such fresh- 

 water menagerie, — the pool of the well-named Wolfs- 

 brimnen, near Heidelberg. 



The age for fresh-water ponds seems to have gone 

 by. There are, to be sure, one or two still to be found 

 about the classic soil of Naples, where the air is for the 

 most part pure; but elsewhere ia Italy the fear of 'mala- 

 ria has generally sealed them up, and wisely too, for it 

 would be paying too dear a price for carp and tench to 

 lodge them in pestiferous tanks, where the angler woxdd 

 at least have an equal chance of catching a fever as a 

 fish.^ The same fear, but not equally well founded, to- 

 wards the close of the last century, induced the French, 

 misguided by the eloquent declamations of Buffon, to 

 fill up with as much .earnestness as we are now exhi- 

 biting in spoliating the land of trees, every fish-pond 

 within reach. 'Les etangs,' writes Lacepede in 1791, 

 ' out presque tons disparu de nos jours meme, du sol de 

 la Prance, quoiqu'ils y fussent autrefois en assez grand 

 nombre.'* Those who at the time wrote against this 

 wholesale demolition of what they justly considered as 

 frequently an embellishment to scenery, otherwise sorry, 

 found no sympathy, and were even denounced as a set 

 of miserable fishmongering monopohsts, who looked only 



* M'Culloch mentions tlaat, in ' 1789, the annual supply of fresh- 

 water fish ia Prance was 1,200,000 ; that it fell some years hack to 

 700,000, and has been diminishing since.' Is he speaking of the 

 registered supplies famished by the markets, or does he keep sta- 

 tistics of all the gamins who use fish-hooks throughout France, 

 and receive from them an annual account of their proceedings, to 

 add to the market account ? Such figures are plainly of no value 

 as records of the actual amount of river-fish consumed in any one 

 year by our Gallic neighbours ; but they are interesting, as, how- 

 ever imperfect, they tend to show that fish in France (like beavers 

 and whales everywhere) were certainly getting low when the 'late 

 new creation' of them began. 



