Some twenty-five years ago Mr. William Shriver, a primitive pisciculturist, took from the Youghiogheny River eleven black bass, and conveyed them in the tank of the tender of a locomotive to Cumberland, in the coal-region of Western Maryland.  There he deposited them in the Potomac, with the injunction which forms the heraldic motto of the State of Maryland—­Crescite et multiplicamini.  The first part of this excellent precept they obeyed by proceeding to devour all the aboriginal fish in the river, and waxing extremely hearty upon the liberal diet.  The second they performed with a diligence so commendable that the name of them in the river became as legion, and the original possessors of the waters were steadily extirpated or took despairingly to small rivulets, and led ever after a life of undeserved ignominy and obscurity.  There were bass in the river from the Falls of the Potomac, near Georgetown, to a point as near its source as any self-respecting fish could approach without detriment to the buttons on his vest by reason of the shallowness of the water.  They were in all its tributaries, and in fact monopolized its waters completely.  Had the supply of small fish for food held out, it is impossible to say to what extent they would have increased.  They might in their numerical enormity have rivalled the condition of that famous river, the Wabash, which in a certain season of excessive dryness became so low that a local journal of established veracity described the fish as having to stand upon their heads to breathe, and while in that constrained attitude being pulled by the inhabitants like radishes in a garden.

It has been contended by some ichthyologists that the black bass does not eat its own kind, but the spectacle which I recently beheld of a four-pounder, defunct and floating on the water, with the tail and half the body of a ten-ounce bass sticking out of his distended mouth, affords but inadequate confirmation of their views.  I sat upon the bass in question, and rendered a verdict of “choked to death, and served him right.”  He had swallowed the younger fish, who, for aught he knew to the contrary, or cared, might have been his own son; and his confidence in his capacity being ably supported by his appetite, he undertook a contract to which he was unequal in the matter of expansion.  He couldn’t disgorge, being in the predicament of the boa-constrictor who swallows a hen head first, and finds her go against the grain when he would fain reconsider the subject.  The head of the inside fish was partially digested, but that process had imparted no gratification to either party, and both were defunct, mutually immolated upon the altar of gluttony.  It is not an uncommon thing to find them dead in that condition, for their appetites are ravenous, and lead them into indiscretions more or less serious in their consequences.