86 . FISH CULTURE. 



the magnificent twenty-pounder, that takes you down 

 with breathless haste, with bending rod and whizzing 

 reel, stumbling and panting, full five hundred yards 

 of that terrific torrent, and flinging somersaults that 

 rival those of the deftest acrobat, gives you a full half- 

 hour's hard work and awful excitement in the dark 

 pool below? Can this little marvel, I say, be the 

 foundation of that which has had hundreds of laws 

 made for it, thousands of pages of reports collected 

 on it, myriads of law-suits fought about it, Eoyal 

 Commissions without end imposed upon it ; treatises 

 unnumbered, written by great lights of science and 

 genius, concerning it; by the catching of which 

 thousands live, and hundreds realize fortunes, or the 

 reverse ; which millions feed on ; and which should 

 be, if properly understood and treated, one of the 

 richest veins of our national wealth and subsis- 

 tence ? Verily, indeed, wonderful are the works of 

 Providence ! Stay, let us look closer : a thin streak, 

 of almost transparent substance, about half an inch 

 in length, at one end of which two wonderfully 

 disproportioned eyes goggle at you through the lens ; 

 at the other end the thin streak turns upwards, and 

 forms the tail part. From immediately below the 

 throat, and along where the belly should be, depends 

 a huge, unwieldy, umbilical bladder, larger, apparently, 



