The size of the ponds, of course, depends upon the number of trout to be reared. It is better to have several medium sized ponds than one large one, as then accident or disease occurring in a pond will only affect a portion of the stock of fish. Mr. J. J. Armistead in _An Angler's Paradise, and How to Obtain It_, says: "A pond sixty feet long, four feet wide, and about three feet deep, will hold ten or fifteen thousand fry at first, and give them plenty of room to grow, but by the end of July the number should be reduced to five thousand, which may be left till October, when they should again be thinned out, or, better still, put into larger pond." I should advise the amateur who is dealing with only a few thousand fish to work on a smaller scale in these proportions, and to make these changes gradually, and yet more gradually as the season advances. That is to say, work with a third of the number of fry in ponds half the size and move some fish several times before the end of July. As October approaches, make changes of smaller numbers of fish more frequently. Late in the autumn is, in my opinion, the best time to put the young fish into the water they are to inhabit permanently. It must be a mistake to rear them artificially longer than is necessary, and by the end of November they should be fairly capable of looking after themselves. Trout, which are artificially reared on chopped meat and other soft foods, suffer from a lack of development in the stomach walls, and also, probably, in the rest of their digestive apparatus. The first case I saw of the stomach of an artificially reared trout was a two-year-old trout, upon which Dr. C. S. Patterson performed an autopsy. The stomach walls were as thin as a sheet of tissue paper. At the time I believed, and, if I remember rightly, he also thought that this was due to atrophy, but I am inclined to think that this idea was only partially correct. The stomach walls of the autumn yearling trout, which is artificially reared on soft food, do not show any marked abnormality in the way of thinness; but as the trout's age increases, so does the thickness of the stomach wall decrease in proportion to its size. This leads me to believe that the development of the stomach wall, at any rate, and probably also of the glands secreting the gastric juice and the digestive apparatus generally, gradually ceases when at about the age of eight or nine months if the trout is fed upon soft food. Probably, also, a certain amount of atrophy and dilatation of the stomach wall is produced. If my observations are correct, so also is the conclusion that a trout which cannot digest hard food, of which a great part of his natural food consists, will not have a really fair chance when turned out. Therefore, I say, turn out your trout in November, unless you can feed them on such food as shrimps, snails, bivalves and _Corixae_; and if you stock with "ready made" fish, stock with yearlings in the late autumn.