FRANK FORESTER'S FISH AND FISHING OF NORTH AMBBICA.* ONE object

of this book is to give a general account of game or sports- manlike fishing in America, with a sufficient outline of ichthyology to en- able the angler to recognize the different classes of fish, or at least to de- scribe them in such a manner that they may be decided upon by the natu- ralist. Another is to furnish a particular description of the various fish found in the United States or British North America, with specific direc- tions touching the modes of angling pursued in their capture. With these didactic matters are blended some sketches of scenery and outpourings of opinion after the usual manner of " Frank Forester," and some inci- dental glimpses of anglers, angling, and ideas thereanen', in the United States; which portions we think the most interesting parts of the volume. The fact is, Frank Forester appears to be more of a sportsman by land than by water, and to have leas knowledge of the rod than the gun. His personal experience seems limited both as regards the districts he has fished in and the fish be has seen. New York and a few of the adjacent States appear to have been the extent of his piscatorial range ; the fishing and fish of the Southern, the Western, and the Northern re- gions, being known to him by hearsay or the writings of others. This, however, might have been passed readily enough, bad he shown mastery over the angling of any one district, and entered into his subject heartily. But he does neither to any great extent. No doubt, considerable allow- ance must be made for the difference between field-sports and angling.

* Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing of the United States, and BriUsh Provinces of North America. By Henry William Herbert, Author of " The Field Sports of the United States and British North America," "Frank Forester and his Friends," Erc. Published by Bentley. The scenery into which the sportsman is taken, if not finer, is much more Various than that which the angler frequents, and is passed over more rapidly ; the animals, their haunts, and habits, can be observed more fully than the bearing of fish, that are only beheld occasionally till they are landed, spent, and half dead ; the training of the dog is matched against the native cunning of the animals he tracks; while more energy, endurance, and active exertion are required in the sportsman, unless per- haps in the rare case where an angler has hooked a salmon in the neigh- bourhood of rapids or a fall, when he may have, like Satan in Chaos, to "swim, or sink, or wade, or creep," or leap. This difference in the pur- suits, however, would not have induced compilation and large quotation in some of the didactic parts, and an air of forced vivacity in more de- scriptive portions, had the writer been thoroughly earnest in his entire subject.

The peculiar character or want of character in American fish and fish- ing may probably tend to cause something of lifelessness in the de- scription of them. There is little if any difference between the angling proper of Europe and America,—meaning by angling proper, float-fish- ing, fly-fishing, trolling, and spinning ; and the author quotes so largely from Holland, that much of the specific directions is already familiar to English readers. Deep sea fishing he does not approve of, and slights ; as indeed he does float-fishing. But the want of excellence in the creatures is of more consequence than want of novelty in their capture. The fish of North America are but indifferent, whether for sport or for table. The king of game fish, the salmon, is hardly to be found. It was once plentiful in the Hudson and its tributaries ;

but it has "now ceased to exist in numbers West of the Penobscot, and even there can be rarely taken with the fly." The true devotee of salmon-fishing is compelled to leave the States behind him, and seek for his sport "in the difficult and uncleared basins of the Nova Scotian rivers or in the Northern tributaries of the St. Lawrence," unless he takes a trip to Oregon. The cause of this desertion is inexplicable, says our author. In various places be complains of poaching, and wanton de- struction; but he does not ascribe the desertion of the salmon to these causes.

"It has been attributed to steam-boats, but that is ideal; for the Tay, the Tweed, and the Clyde, and half a dozen other English and Scottish rivers, which still abound in salmon, are harassed by more steam-boats, hourly, than are the Kennebeck and Penobscot now, or than were the Hudson and Connecticut at the time when the salmon forsook them, daily. "I think it, myself, far more probable that they were poisoned, and driven from the head waters and tributaries in which they were wont to spawn, by the saw- dust, especially the hemlock; and that the stock which were used to run up these estuaries having become extinct, the traditional instinct is lost, and there are no fish left which know the way to our waters."

It seems almost as bad in Canada.

" Within a few years, indeed, the rivers close around Quebec, the Montmorenci, the Chaudiere, and the Jacques Cartier, abounded with salmon; and a drive of a few hours in the morning from the plains of Abraham set the fisherman on waters where he could confidently count on filling his creel, even to overflowing, before nightfall; but latterly these streams have failed almost entirely, and a sail of many miles down the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Saguenay or the lordship of Mingan has now become necessary to insure good sport. "In the Upper Province of Canada, although salmon run up the river into Lake Ontario, and frequent many of the streams falling into it from the Northern shore, as the Credit and others, they are very rarely fished for or taken with the fly; and it is said confidently that in the lake itself they will not take the fly under any circumstances.

" Within my own recollection, salmon were wont to run up the Oswego, and so find their way into all the lesser lakes of the State of New York; but the dams on the river, erected, I believe, in order to the construction of the canal, have completely shut them out from these waters. I may here observe, that it is very greatly to be deplored that, as is compelled by law in the Scottish and Irish sal- mon avers, a small aperture is not left in the rivers and dams, if they be above twelve feet in height, by which the fish may ascend to the cool and gravelly head- waters, in which they deposit their spawn.

"Stich an aperture or run-way, which need not be of more than two or three feet square, would not occasion any material waste of water in rivers of the vast volume and rapidity which are characteristic of all the American salmon rivers, and therefore would detract nothing from the utility of the works ; while by suf- fering this most valuable fish to ascend the course, and so to propagate its species, it would insure to the inhabitants of the inland shores a delicious variety of food, and create anew an important article of commerce. "It is singular that the salmon of the lakes are never known to enter the Nia- gara river, although they are constantly taken at its mouth. They might ascend it some sixteen or seventeen miles to the foot of the Falls; but I believe it to be a fact that none have ever been taken within the stream.

" The cause of this is probably to be found in the great depth of the Niagara river, in its abrupt and wall-like shores, and in the total absence of gravel beds, or pebbly shoals of any kind, on which they can deposit their ova."

The haunts of the salmon-trout are still more rare. " There is but one region on this continent in which this admirable sport [salmon-trout fishing] can be enjoyed at all ; for, singular to say, the fish is only to be found in these rivers of New Brunswick which flow Eastwardly into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Bays of Gaspe and Chaleurs." Trout are more readily met with; but they are small : many Americans consider the size of .Thames and other English trout as anglers' fables. An oc- casional sea-fish affords sport, so does a river-fish now and then in the Hudson's Bay territories, but too distant for an anglers excursion ; in- deed, they are only known by the description of naturalists. There is a congener to the European pike, but apparently inferior ; and there is the perch, though, like the trout, it does not reach the size of the English fish. The others are naught. Great monsters exist, without vivacity, pluck, or flavour. They will not rise to a fly ; in fact, they can only be taken by deep fishing. When hooked, they have none of the sagacity, spirit, and varied resources of the salmon. They greedily swallow the bait : when they feel the hook, they may make one bolt of it ; and then it becomes an affair of tug—a mere dead pull, in which if you and your tackle are strong enough the fish is sure to be hauled in. In some ju- dicious remarks on the rationale of sport or game, in the early part of the book, Frank Forester reaches the philosophy of the subject. "By game fish, we understand all those which will take the natural or arti- ficial bait with sufficient boldness and avidity, and which when hooked are endowed with sufficient vigour, courage, and rapidity of motion, to offer so meek resistance, and give so much difficulty to the captor, as to render the pursuit ex- citing and agreeable, apart from any consideration of the intrinsic value of the fish.

"By these qualities of the hooked fish, corresponding qualities of the fisher- man are called forth; and the greater the wariness and cunning of the fish before he takes the bait, compelling the use of the finest and most delicate tackle—the greater his fury, vehemence, and velocity after being struck, requiring the utmost nicety of manipulation, coolness of temper, and promptitude of judgment—the higher does he stand in the list of game, and the more animating is his pursuit and capture.

" The truth is, that in all field-sports, the pleasure to be derived from them,. and the rank in which they stand one to the other, are all in exact proportion, not with the value or the numbers of the victims, but with the difficulty of the capture, and the degree of skill, science, courage, or endurance, called forth in the

of taking. " Were this not so, shooting small birds baited with grain about a barn-door during a snow-storm, or scooping mackerel and herring out of their schulla [shoals] by buckets-full at a time, would be a higher pursuit and better sport than shooting quail and woodcock on the wing over well-broke dogs, or killing a thirty-pound salmon with the slender gut and artificial fly.

"And so they are better sport to the schoolboys and snobs who practise them,. and who, lacking entirely the art, the energy, and the perseverance necessary to success in the true, field-sports, are perfectly content with arriving at the bad emi- nence of pot-gunners and ground-fishers, and then, presuming on their paltry numerical success, affect to undervalue as profitless the art which they cannot attain.

" It is the wariness, the subtlety, and the caution of the salmon, rendering it necessary to use materials of the slenderest and most delicate nature, and to ap- ply them with the utmost nicety, which makes the triumph over him so far more enthralling to the real fisherman than that over the pickerel or mascalonge of equal weight, whose greater voracity and inferior intellect permits the use of a gimp foot-length, and a silken or flaxen line, instead of the fine gut tinctured to- the very colour of the water, and the casting-line of almost invisible minuteness. "The same is the superiority of rod and reel fishing to the use of the hand- line, whether in trolling or in deep-sea fishing; because in both these the sport is at an end so soon as the fish is hooked ; it being a mere question of brute strength whether the victim shall be conquered or not, when once fast at the end of a line

capable of pulling in a yearling bullock. • "It is remarkable, however, that all those fish which are the most game, the boldest, the strongest, the bravest, and the most obstinate, are invariably the- finest also for culinary purposes, and the most highly appreciated by the gourmet on the board, as well as by the fisherman in the nver or the mere."

The probable destruction of some entire species of fish is impending, as is threatened in the case of birds and animals, owing to unsportsman- like practices, and the absence of stringent game-laws, which the State of New York has refused to pass. They have, however, made a beginning,. in the case of some imported carp, of all things! "The mode of this fish's introduction into American waters is as follows. Cap- tain Robinson, who has a fine place immediately on the banks of the Hudson river' containing some fine fish-ponds, between Newburgh and New Windsor, im- ported some years since a quantity of carp at considerable expense, I believe from. Holland, where the species is very abundant and very fine in quality. His ponds. were soon admirably stocked; but in process of time a heavy freshet carried away his dams and flood-gates, and a very large proportion of his carp escaped into the Hudson. This fact being represented to the Legislature of the State, a penal enactment was passed, heavily mulcting any person who should take any one of these Hudson river carp, at any season or under any circumstances until after the expinitionof five years from the passing of the act. " The provisions of this bill have been strictly enforced; several persons have been fined; and the fish is now extremely abundant. - "I cannot here, in relating these circumstances, control myself, but must in- voke the contempt and indignation of every gentle sportsman, every reasonable thinking man, i upon the heads of that ignorant, motley, and destructive assem- blage, which s entitled the Senate and Assembly of New York. For the last fifteen years not a session has passed without the strenuous and sustained attempts of the most educated and most influential gentlemen of the States both of the city and the agricultural counties, to induce the faineant de- magognes of that assembly to take some measure to prevent the total extinction within that very county of Orange of some of the noblest species of game in ex- istence' indigenous to that region, and once abundant, but already scarce, and within twenty years certain to be lost altogether, through the malepractices of their destroyers, the errors of the existing game-laws, and the difficulty of en- forcing them in their present state. " It is quite unnecessary to state that these efforts were wholly ineffectual; that it was found impossible to induce those learned Thebans to do anything to prevent American woodcock from being shot before they are fledged, and Ameri- can brook trout from being caught upon their spawning-beds ; but that no sooner- is a coarse, watery, foreign fish accidentally thrown into American waters, thanit is vigorously and effectively protected."

The volume is illustrated by a profusion of wood-cats of a very gra- phic character, the physiognomy of the fish coming out distinctly. They were drawn on the wood by the author, "either from the fishes them- selves, or from original drawings in the possession of Professor Agassiz, lent for that purpose," with some half-dozen exceptions that are -copied from works of authority.