Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/778

760 meat cutter having holes one thirty-second of an inch at first, the holes increasing in size as the fish can take larger particles. This is mixed with sufficient water, and little by little scattered along the troughs from a wooden spatula, taking care not to feed so much at once that it will not be eaten. With twenty troughs one man should feed all day, getting back to the first one in half an hour, for, like all small animals, the trout want but little at a time, but want it often. For this reason I never advise a novice who receives fish from the State to pen them up and feed them; they would surely be starved, for if the. young are not fed a dozen times a day they will show it by a shrunken body which appears to be all head. A trout at two to three months old should be larger around the abdomen than about the head, and there should be no pinched look behind the gills. If you can not give the babies this care, turn them into the stream or lake, and let them find their food and face their enemies, and you will have more and better fish. To take trout eggs and hatch them is not difficult, but the best trout breeder is the one who brings the greatest percentage of what he has hatched to be thrifty fish at six months old.

For the yearling trout the liver may be cut in pieces from a quarter to half an inch, and they should be fed all they can eat at least twice a day. Larger fish will take more and larger pieces, and will get along if fed once each day, preferably in the evening, but they do not suffer if neglected for a day as the babies do, and we find the same rule all through animal life in mammals and birds, with which most people are more familiar—the young require frequent feeding.

Too much importance can not be attached to the feeding of the fry in the early days of their taking food. It is the critical time, not only of their lives, but of their future development. No amount of feeding can make a thrifty fish of one which has been stunted by scant food in its first few months of life, and right here is where intelligent care turns the scale between profit and loss.

During the quarter of a century in which I have been engaged in this work, and have had to trust the care of the fish to employees because my own time was fully occupied with other work, the man most valued was he who took best care of the babies and fed them as though he loved them, and not in the spirit of one who did it as a task.

If one wishes to raise trout on artificial food he must bend to the task as he would if he were to raise any other stock in quantities in confined quarters; but he can arrange natural spawning races, and either take the eggs by hand or let them be laid by the fish, and be satisfied with a much less number of fish hatched,