run much larger, two and three pound fish being frequently killed. As to what hours in the day are the best for catching grayling, it is obvious that, as they are in season from August to December, they rise at very different times during those months. In August I have seen them rise best, as a rule, from four o'clock to seven or eight; but as the days shorten they only feed when the chill of the morning is off the water, and cease when the evening damp and cold comes on. At those periods, therefore, the middle of the day is the most profitable time. Take him altogether, the grayling is a fish well worthy of the angler's careful attention, and as he is to be caught in months when trout fishing is prohibited, he deserves perhaps higher commendation than he has hitherto received at the hands of the fly-fishing fraternity. CHAPTER I HISTORICAL PISCICULTURE has been described as 'the art of fecundating and hatching fish-eggs and of nursing young fish under protection till they are of an age to take care of themselves.' Complete, however, as this definition may have been considered thirty years ago, it does not, as we shall presently see, embrace all that is included in the scope of fish culture as understood and practised at the present time. The origin of the art seems to be lost in remote antiquity. It was in China, we are told, that gunpowder was first used; and it is to the Celestial Empire also that we must go for the earliest examples of fish culture.1 Straw and grass are, as we learn, tied round posts floated against the current of a river. Hurdles, mats and faggots, too, are attached to wooden posts fixed in the bed of the watercourse. The fishes' spawn floating down with the stream is arrested by these traps which The Harvest of the Sea, by James G. Bertram. |