Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/769

 our native brook trout, the brown trout, or common brook trout of Europe, and the rainbow trout of California. The trout for distribution are sent out when about ready to take food—in March and April. Those to be kept at the station for breeders are fed in the troughs for a month or more, and are then put in the "baby ponds." These are of two-inch yellow-pine sides and one-inch bottoms, twenty-five feet long, three feet wide, and about twenty inches deep, with a strong flow and double screens of No. 8 wire cloth, between which is a dam an inch higher than the pond below. In these ponds are "rests," made of projections from the sides or of dams, with a surface stop-water a few inches below them, which causes the water to flow up and over the dam, and is then again deflected below. This keeps weak fish from being swept against the screens, and makes eddies for the food to swirl about in, instead of sinking. Mr. Hoxsie has patented an ingenious device to



feed young fish in, and it is somewhat different from this plan which I used at Honeoye Falls, N. Y., in 1874 and since. Of these "baby ponds" we have ten, and, as we put ten thousand fry in each, we start in with only three of them stocked; but the little fellows have a way of getting around screens that are supposed to be tight, and before they are an inch and a half long some are found in the lower ponds, having gone through joints in the planks or sides or bottom, or around some loose screen, if not through a