There can be no doubt of their having regarded as a delicate attention the action some few years since of the Maryland Fish Commissioner in placing several thousand young California salmon in the river.  Those salmon have never been seen or heard of since; but, although the bass for some time had a guilty look about them, it is hardly fair to let them remain under so grievous an imputation as is implied in the whole responsibility for the fate of the California emigrants.  The fact is, that at Georgetown the Potomac River makes a very abrupt change in its grade, and the Great Falls, as they are called, are both picturesque and arduous of passage.  The salmon, being of luxurious habit, betakes him each year to the seaside, and at the end of the season returns in a connubial frame of mind to the spot endeared to him by his early associations.  It is quite possible that these particular salmon when on their way to the purlieus of marine fashion were somewhat discouraged at the jar and shock incident to their transit over the Falls.  They may have concluded that the locality was unpropitious for the return trip, and then, consulting with salmon whose lines had been cast in more pleasant places, they may have ascended rivers of more conspicuous natural attractions and more agreeable to fish of cultivated habits.

The habits of the black bass may be described as generally bad.  It is a fish devoid of any of the cardinal virtues.  It is ever engaged in internecine war, and will any day forego a square meal for the sake of a fight.  It gorges itself like a python, and when hooked is as game as a salmon, and quite as vigorous in proportion to size.  In the Potomac it has been known to weigh as much as six pounds, but bass of that weight are very rare, from three to four pounds being the average of what are known as good fish.  These afford excellent sport, and are taken with a variety of bait.  The habitues of the river commonly employ live minnow, chub, catfish, suckers, sunfish—­in fact, any fish under six inches in length.  The bass has also a well-marked predilection for small frogs, or indeed for frogs of any dimensions.  It sometimes rises well at a gaudy, substantial fly or a deft simulation of a healthy Kansas grasshopper; but fishermen have noticed that the largest fish despise flies, much as a person of a full roast-beef habit may be supposed to turn up his nose at a small mutton-chop.  In other rivers they take the fly quite freely, but in the Potomac they have had that branch of their education greatly neglected.  In the matter of vitality they are simply extraordinary:  they cling to life with a tenacity that very few fish exhibit.  In the spring or fall, when the water and the air are at a comparatively low temperature, a bass will live for eight or ten hours without water.  The writer has brought fifty fish, weighing on an average two and three-quarter pounds, from Point of Rocks to Baltimore, a distance of seventy-two miles, and after