June 16, 1893.] 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



867 



rolling now. Consequently nothing need be done nor any 

 expense incurred in putting the rivers in order for 

 asylums of refuge for the salmon. 



3. No complications now exist or can come up in 

 future, in regard to land titles in the island. The United 

 States Government owns the land already like the rest of 

 Alaska, by direct purchase from Russia, and has never 

 parted with any of its exclusive rights of ownership. No 

 State or Territory, or company or individual owns an acre 

 of it. Consequently the U. S. Government can set aside 

 the island for any purpose whatever, without interfering 

 with any prior rights or titles, or incurring any risk of 

 litigation.* Alaska is already one great reservation. 



4. The island will probably never be wanted for any- 

 thing else. The summer season is so short that no crops 

 can be raised there, and it is not likely that for many 

 generations, if ever, the land will be wanted by perma- 

 nent settlers, and it is now inhabited only by a few 

 Aleuts and half breed families who would not be inter- 

 fered with. There would be no injustice done to indi- 

 viduals by making a reservation of the island. 



5. Last but not least, artificial hatching can be insti- 

 tuted there at any time, if it is ever thought best, and on 

 a vast scale if desired; and unlimited numbers of the eggs 

 of the various kinds of salmon noted above, can be ob- 

 tained for distribution and sent to all other parts of the 

 country where they may be needed. 



The above considerations sepm to indicate that Afognak 

 Island possesses all the qualification required for aplace of 

 safety for our Pacific Ocean salmon without presenting 

 any objections to its being reserved by the Federal Gov- 

 ernment for salmon, or in other words, converted into a 

 National Salmon Park. 



The writer, however, would not urge the claims of 

 Afognak or any other place to this distinction as against 

 those of any locality that may be found to be better fitted 

 for it. This island has been brought forward merely as 

 showing that one place at least is known that would 

 answer the purposes of a salmon park. There are doubt- 

 less others in our Alaskan possessions. There are possibly 

 better ones. If a better place can be found, let us take 

 it. If not, let us take Afognak Island; but at all events 

 let some place be selected and set aside by the authority 

 of the National Government. If not Afognak Island, let 

 it be some other place. Provide some refuge for the 

 salmon, and provide it quickly, before complications 

 ari c e which may make it impracticable, or at least very 

 difficult. Now is the time. Delays are dangerous. Some 

 unforeseen difficulties may come up which we do not 

 dream of now, any more than we did a few years ago of 

 logging on the Clackamas, or railroad building on the 

 upper Sacramento. 



If we procrastinate and put off our rescuing mission 

 too long, it may be too late to do any good. After the 

 rivers are ruined and the salmon are gone they cannot be 

 reclaimed. Exaggerated as the statement- seems, it is 

 nevertheless true that all the power of the United States 

 cannot restore the salmon to the rivers after the work of 

 destruction has been completed. The familiar nursery 

 rhyme about the egg applies here with peculiar fitness: 

 "Ilumpty Dumpty sat on a wall, 

 Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. 

 All the king's horses and all the king's men 

 Could not set Hnnipty as before." 



That if the whole thing, so to speak, in an eggshell. 

 After the salmon rivers are ruined all the king's horses 

 and all the king's men, that is to say, all the power of 

 the government, "cannot set them as before." 



Let us act then at once and try to do something for the 

 salmon before it is too late. Dangerous complications 

 may come suddenly upon us which we cannot foresee, 

 How little we foresaw the danger to the buffalo and the 

 fur seals. How suddenly the disastrous results came. 

 Even if not impracticable it may cost large sums of 

 money to do hereafter what may be done now for 

 nothing. No expense may be incurred at present. All 

 that is required is to have Afognak Island or some other 

 suitable place set aside by national authority as Gen, 

 Grant set aside the McCloud River Reservation during 

 his administration, and it can be left to future events to 

 decide whether it is expedient to expend any money on 

 the reservation, a subject that can be safely left, we all 

 know, in the hands of our efficient Commissioner of Fish 

 and Fisheries. There seems to be no impropriety in the 

 United States having a national salmon park, but on the 

 contrary it appears eminently proper that a great natural 

 salmon country like ours should have set apart some safe 

 repository and fruitful breeding grounds for this noble 

 fish. 



Consider for a moment what the salmon has done for 

 us, and then think how mercilessly we have treated him. 

 Our salmon have been to us a source of national revenue, 

 enjoyment and pridp, and what return have we meted 

 out to him? He has been hunted pitilessly with hooks 

 and spears, with all kinds of nets and pounds, with wheels 

 and guns and dynamite, and there is not a cubic foot of 

 water in the whole country where he can rest in safety. 

 The moment he comes in from the ocean he meets the gill 

 nets and the pounds at the mouth of the river, the sweep 

 seines further up, the hook everywhere, and at last on his 

 breeding grounds, which at least ought to be sacred to 

 him, be encounters the pitchforks of the white man and 

 the spears of the Indian. 



Let us now, at the eleventh hour, take pity on our long- 

 persecuted salmon and do him the poor and tardy justice 

 of giving him, in our broad land that he has done so much 

 for, one place where he can come and go unmolested and 

 where he can rest in safety. 



Allow me to add in closing that it seems to me highly 

 appropriate that this S ;ciety, which represents with such 

 intelligence and ability all the fishing interests of every 

 kind of this country, should take the initiative in a matter 

 in which those interests are so closely concerned. The 

 writPr trusts that it will, and ventures to predict that, if 

 its efforts in that direction should happily be rewarded by 

 the creation of a national salmon park, it would become 

 an enduring monument to the usefulness of the Society 

 that would last as long as the Nation lasts. 



Livingston Stone. 



* There are two canneries oppvaoing in the sou' hern part of the 

 island, but there wouH probably not be great difficulty in making 

 satisfactory arrangements with them. 



A Book About Indians.— The Forest .vnd Stream will mail 

 free on application a descriptive circular of Mr. Grinnell's book 

 "Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-tales," giving a table of conten ts 

 and specimen illustrations from the volume,— Adv. 



ANGLING NOTES. 



Herr von dem Borne writes that Prince Hartfeld- 

 Trachenberg, a nobleman of Silesia, has been elected 

 president of the Deutscher Fiscberei-Verein, to succeed 

 Dr. von Behr, who died last January. It was Dr. von 

 Brfhr for whom the United States Fish Commissioner 

 named the common European trout introduced into this 

 country, "Von Behr trout. 3 ' 



By this time it is quite generally known that Dr. 

 Theodatus Garlick. of Bedford, Ohio, was the first in this 

 country to propagate the brook trout by artificial means. 

 Mr. J. M. Greene, of Cleveland, Ohio, tells me that he 

 made the first photograph that was made in the city of 

 Cleveland; that it was made in July, 1857, and that it was 

 a photograph (portrait) of Dr. Garlick. 



A copy of the first edition of "Walton's Complete 

 Angler." 1653, was recently sold by Sotheby. in London, 

 for £M0, or about $1,020 American money. The price of 

 the book when published was eighteen pence, or say 

 thirty -five cents of our currency. At the Richard Ha- 

 worth sale in London, 1826, by Sotheby, a copy of the 

 first.edition of Walton brought £10 15s. At the John Mil- 

 ner sale in London, 1829, a copy brought £15, and at the 

 Higgs sale in 1830 a copy brought only £11; but at the 

 same sale an illustrated Walton, edition not given, 

 brought £63. When Dr. Bethune edited the first Ameri- 

 can edition of Walton, in 1847, he estimated that a copy 

 of the original edition in good order was worth twelve 

 guineas. In 1883 Westwood said that a perfect copy of 

 the first edition was worth £70 to £80, anel at the Beck- 

 ford Library sale in 1883 a copy was sold for £87. And 

 yet that same year I got a catalogue from Sabin, the Lon- 

 don bookseller, in which he advertised a fine copy of the 

 first edition for £55. Sabin's copy was bound in extra 

 red morocco and in a brown morocco case, and this may 

 have made it £160 cheaper than the copy sold at aution 

 at the Beckford sale. 



Mr. Lawrence D. Alexander, of New York city, has 

 one hundred editions of Walton's and Walton & Cotton's 

 "Complete Angler," and he is the only collector in this 

 country who has one hundred different editions.beginning 

 with the five editions published during Walton's life and 

 ending with Mr. R. B. Marston's sumptuous edition which 

 rounds out the hundred, 



I am tempted to quote from a personal letter of Mr. 

 Alexander's in regard to a visit that he made to Blooming- 

 Grove Park, Pike county. Pa., for the trout fishing at 

 the opening of the season in April. He caught the regu- 

 lation five trout per diem from Lake Gdes, which is all 

 that club law permits. "They were taken with live bait, 

 as it was too raw and cold for them to rise to a fly. The 

 fish were loggy and lacked the vigor of ours in the 

 Adirondacks. No mid winter fishing for me. The club 

 is doing wonders in rearing trout and restocking streams 

 and lakes. I never in my life saw so complete and ex- 

 tensive a plant for hatching and rearing. Five hundred 

 thousand trout hatched yearly, and nearly all turned out 

 when J to | pound in weight. That -is, two or three- 

 year-olds only are deposited." Phe park waters would 

 not now be a very good place to plant trout fry expecting 

 them to come to anything. 



Trolling for lake trout in deep water with long line 

 and heavy sinker is "like railroading, a very particular 

 business." The novice has a bite every time that the 

 sinker strikes a rock or the grass, and fifteen-sixteenths 

 of the time that he is fishing he is between the devil 

 and the deep sea whether to pull in a long line because 

 a fish may have loosed the bait or leave it in the water 

 because the "bite" was only the sinker striking the bot- 

 tom. Experience, and plenty of it, teaches him to dis- 

 tinguish between striking the bottom and the bite of 

 even a small trout when there is a tug at the end of the 

 line where the sinker and bait are "keeping company," 

 but after much practice it requires a delicate sense of 

 feeling to tpll when a baby trout has immolated itself on 

 the hooks 900ft. away, while a heavy sinker is pulled 

 down on the line between the fish and the fisherman. I 

 once detected a bite while fishing with 450ft. of line 

 and using 20oz. of sinker, and upon drawing the fish in 

 judged it to weigh not over a quarter of a pound. A few 

 days ago a Lake George fisherman fishing the bottom felt 

 a suspicion of a strike, and upon drawing in his line 

 found that he had a very, very small trout. As it was 

 alive and unhurt he put it in his bait bucket, took it 

 ashore, weighed it, found that on post-office scales it 

 weighed 2Aoz and then returned it to the water. This, 

 I think, beats all previous records of small lake trout 

 captured in deep trolling. 



A week ago, in reply to a correspondent, I said that 

 black bass fishing was legal in the waters of Warren 

 county, except Lake George, on and after May 30. 

 Several fishermen from the cities are now located in 

 Warren county expecting to fish for black bass during 

 this month ; but the Warrensburgh News, in its last issue, 

 contains this item: "Bass fishing is prohibited in this 

 (Warren) county until July 1, by laws passed by the 

 Board of Supervisors two years ago. The new law 

 passed at the recent session of the Legislature repeals all 

 previous State statutes, but does not affect local legisla- 

 tion by county Boards of Supervisors." Then follows the 

 local law with its penalties. It would be of immense 

 benefit to the black bass if the News was correct about 

 the law, for the bass spawn all through the month of 

 June: but unfortunately the News is in error in giving 

 the advice that it does. Section 273 of the new law reads 

 as follows: "All laws or ordinances heretofore passed, 

 by any Board of Supervisors of any county in this State, 

 relating to birds, fish, shellfish and wild animals, are 

 hereby repealed." The next Bection, 273, gives the Super- 

 visors power to enact, at their annual session, laws for 

 the "additional protection" of fish and game. This op- 

 portunity to furnish actual protection for black bass 

 should be embraced by fishermen and others interested 

 in the fish. 



The mention of Warrensburgh and the game law in 

 connection, brings to mind another matter. The new 

 game law is sometimes mentioned as the code resulting 

 from the labors of the Codifying Commission, and this 

 gives an entirely wrong impression, for the present law 



resembles the one reported by the commission as nearly 

 as a human freak in a museum resembles a perfect physi- 

 cal man. Deputy Attorney General Edward G. Whitaker, 

 who was one of the Codifying Commission, has compiled 

 an annotated edition of the game law to correct the 

 wrong impression. One of the most infamous sections of 

 the law is numbered 140, and it might be termed very 

 fittingly the "poachers' and fish-murderers' section." It 

 applips only to Warren county waters in its worst features, 

 which are that spears, guns and nets may be used to kill 

 certain fish, which of course means all fish. Mr. Whit- 

 aker's note to Sec. 140 is this: "The provision in this 

 section authorizing the netting, etc., of suckers, etc., in 

 Warren county, was advocated to the commission by 

 Albert H. Thomas, and it is in the interest of those opposed 

 to protection and in favor of netting in the fresh waters. 

 The commission opposes this provision." 



Yes, the Commission opposed this provision success- 

 fully, but it was added to the bill in Assembly, then 

 billed and added again in the Senate. 



Mr. Albert H. Thomas is the treasurer of Warren 

 county, and I think claims to be a sportsman; anyway he 

 kills fish and game. When the bill was in the Senate he 

 offered to bet one hundred to one (the odds would indi- 

 cate that bo had a dead open-and-shut cinch on the 

 Senate) that the bill would not become a law unless 

 woodcock shooting was permitted in August, and yet I 

 never heard that Mr. Thomas was a market gunner or 

 that he "kept a hotel," like "Mr. Riley," and there seems 

 to be but one other reason for his interest in the matter. 

 An Albany sportsman said : "The pot-hunter and mar- 

 ket fisherman, aided by the big hotels like those of Sara- 

 toga, had a lobby here, which prevented the fish and 

 game bill from going through in its original form." 



A year ago this month I was writing late at night 

 when one of the smaller drakes (May flies) came in at the 

 open window and quietly settled on my paper, as if to 

 say. "May Hies are up; it is time to go fishing with 

 the fly." 



A few nights ago I was again writing late, and in at 

 the open window came a drake and settled on the sheet 

 upon which I was writing. A few moments after in 

 came a spinner with its long slender legs, cylindrical, 

 jointed body and narrow wings, and after a tilt with the 

 light dropped into my ink. If this was not an invitation 

 to get out fly-rod and fly-book and go afishing, what 

 was it? 



The next morning I found on a window screen seven 

 drakes, six of one species and one of another. I regret 

 that I have not studied the score of smaller drakes to be 

 able to tell one from another at sight, and I saved none 

 of them for identification , as I supposed I could get more 

 on succeeding mornings, and I wished these to live for 

 another purpose. After breakfast I filled my largest 

 pipe, lighted it, and sat clown by the screen with the 

 Mayflies. Six of the drakes had two whisks each, the 

 other had three, and was a bit larger in body and wings. 

 My daughter's eyes, which are sharper than mine, were 

 the first to discover that the skin on the back of one of 

 the smaller drakes, near the head, had split. Then there 

 was an undulating motion of head and body, and first 

 one and then another leg was lifted as a man might pull 

 his legs out of the mud. The legs grew longer and 

 longer, and a glass showed that they were being with- 

 drawn from an outer skin, as, to continue the simile, 

 the man stuck in the mud would pull his legs from his 

 long boots. The outer skin seemed to adhere to the 

 screen as if fastened with a sticky substance. In a few 

 seconds the legs were clean and the drake rested for a 

 moment. Then the undulations of the body began again. 

 Before they had been distinctly up and down, now they, 

 were forward and back, or serpentine, as though the 

 body contracted and elongated. This movement was in- 

 tensfied to the eye by the ringed body of the drake. The 

 head was slowly bending backward toward the extremity 

 of the body when suddenly the wings were drawn clear 

 of the outer skin. Another rest for a moment and the 

 brave little drake crawled forward a trifle, leaving the 

 filmy skin, even to the covering of the whisks, fast to the 

 whisks, fast to the screen. The drake, which had been 

 dusty and gray, was bright and shining. Its wings were 

 transparent and glossy, its winged body was brighter 

 and altogether it was a neater and more trim little drake 

 than before throwing off its outer skin. 



A. N. Cheney. 



The Professor's Profit. 



Before the Fish Commissioners decided to stock the 

 streams of the State with that much despised but power- 

 ful fish the German carp, it was greatly concerned as to 

 whether the species would live in certain waters. It de- 

 bated the question through several meetings, grew red in 

 the face over it, and to save heat and a possible disruption 

 of the board, determined to submit the question to Prof. 

 Hochstadter, the eminent pisciculturist, for decision. 

 Numerous samples of the water were obtained and turned 

 over to the Professor, who in a very brief space submitted 

 a report and a bill for $100. The bill was paid and the 

 devastating carp turned loose to disorder the rivers. It 

 was not until the other day, however, when Judge Hen- 

 shaw and Prof. Hochstadter were Btraining their imagin- 

 ations over fishing experiences while crossing on the 

 Piedmont, that the truth about the great scientist's ex- 

 periments with that water came out. He chuckled so 

 much over telling about his bill for $100, that Henshaw 

 asked: "But how did you ascertain that carp would 

 live in the water submitted to you?" "Why, I bought a 

 carp for ten cents and put it into the water. It lived." — 

 San Francisco Examiner. 



Pennsylvania Trout Waters. 



Mtjncy, Pa., June 10.— The late rains and cold weather 

 has had its effect on the fishing, and no big catches were 

 made until within the last ten days. The trout were in 

 their winter quarters when this last rain came on. It is 

 expected now, however, that they will move up the 

 streams, as the streams are bank f ull. A fisherman of 

 this place spent last Wednesday on the Loyalsock and 

 caught twenty-eight before the "splash" came, which 

 was about ll A. M. He had one trout that would weigh 

 21bs. and a number that weighed from f to lib. each. 

 Some large ones have been caught at English Center. 

 Good catches for the stream were made in Lycoming 

 Creek soon after April 16. Several weighing lib. each 

 have been taken at the dam in Muncy Creek by Mr. L.W. 

 Crawford, of this place.— M. E. J, 



