THE GAME BREEDER 



11 



sport, but let us first get the fish to catch. 

 Highly important as this may be, the use 

 of practical common sense and the same 

 intelligent methods that are employed in 

 cultivating any farm product will give 

 more profit to fish culture than to corn 

 or wheat culture, and it is far less diffi- 

 cult and laborious. 



There are hundreds of farms in New 

 England and in the Middle States, where 

 a greater income could be derived from 

 raiding fish than from raising any other 

 product, and in many cases a greater in- 

 come than from raising all other pro- 

 ducts combined. It merely requires a 

 little work at the beginning and a little 

 intelligent effort. The ordinary farmer 

 does not attempt to raise corn in his 

 meadow or cranberries on bis hillside ; 

 neither would he attempt to raise trout 

 in a still mud pond or black bass in a 

 cold mountain stream. 



As to the pleasure of fishing, you 

 know all about that. It has been the 

 theme of philosopher and poet for ages, 

 and possibly it has never been extolled 

 beyond its worth, although disguise it 

 as we may, there is not much pleasure in 

 fishing without the expectation of get- 

 ting a good mess of fish and not much 

 pleasure in getting a good mess of fish 

 without the anticipation of enjoying a 

 meal from them. 



This magazine then will inform its 

 readers how to raise fish, how to raise 

 all kinds of fresh water fish, how to have 

 good fishing and how to make money 

 raising fish. It is to show you the pleas- 

 ure of being able to have fish for your 

 own table and fish for other tables or. 

 for the market. We hope this knowl- 

 edge may be interesting ; the more so the 

 better. Yet it will not be told solely to 

 be interesting but rather to be useful 

 and instructive. 



Profit in fishing? Well, the plain 

 facts indicate that it is as profitable as 

 any other business. The angling leases 

 for Restigouche river in the Province 

 of Quebec sell for a princely sum every 

 year. James J. Hill pays $5,000 annual 

 rental to the provincial government of 

 Quebec for simply the rod and line fish- 

 ing in the little Saint Jean river, and he 

 would pay ten times that sum except 

 that the stream is so inaccessible that 



an ordinary angler can not aflford to get 

 within reach of it. On the north shore 

 of the St. Lawrence river is a little 

 stream called the Moisie, which sells its 

 salmon fishing rights for $100,000 a 

 year, one Boston man paying $30,000 to 

 the government for his part. The Resti- 

 gouche Salmon Club, which of course, is 

 devoted to this fishing alone, gets 

 $15,000 each for its shares, and the fish- 

 ing privileges for this river are estimated 

 at iDcing worth a million dollars. Forty- 

 one years ago the first man to lease the 

 privileges of this stream paid $100 for it. 

 Another small stream in the province of 

 Quebec is leased by an angling club for 

 $12,500 annually. Scores of other sal- 

 mon waters bring an annual rental of 

 $500 to $100,000 a year. Twenty or 

 thirty years ago fishing properties in 

 Canada were sold for from $1,000 to 

 $2,000 and they are now worth from 

 $20,000 to $50,000. 



So much for salmon fishing, which is, 

 of cotirse, somewhat out of the range of 

 most of our readers, but every living 

 human being in this country has a gold 

 mine who has a trout brook on his farm 

 and, if he owns any kind of a pond or a 

 stream, he may be sure of a good income 

 provided he uses the same intelligence in 

 cultivating fish that he would in culti- 

 vating anything else. 



In order to lay a good foundation for 

 the series of fish culture articles that are 

 to hereafter appear from month to 

 month in this magazine, a word or two 

 of fish in general, and of their character- 

 istics of the lowest class of vertebrated 

 animals. 



Living as they do in a world of their 

 own, and moving in that which is heav- 

 ier than air and of about the same den- 

 sity as their own bodies, they can move 

 easily, rapidly and with very little mus- 

 cular effort. Their form, fins, and 

 smooth surface is also an admirable aid 

 to ease of getting about, so to speak. 

 Their blood is red but it is cold and 

 their vital energy is thus less than that 

 of mammals or birds. Their brain is very 

 small and their organ of sense or of im- 

 pressions in the matter of sight, smell, 

 hearing, taste and touch, is imperfectly 

 developed. Even the most humane per- 

 son and one with the tenderest heart 



