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 they had been in the air six hours has placed them in a tub of water and found two-thirds of the number immediately "kick" and plunge with an amount of energy and ability that threw the water in all directions. These fish had been caught at various times during the day, and as each was taken from the hook a stout leather strap was forced through the floor of its mouth beneath its tongue, and the bunch of fish so secured allowed to trail overboard in the stream. They were thus dragged all day against a powerful current, but never showed any symptoms of "drowning." In the evening they were strung upon a stout piece of clothes-line, and after lying for some time on the railway platform were transferred to the floor of the baggage-car, and so transported to the city. It is quite evident that we do not live in the fear of Mr. Bergh. But what is one to do? The fish is not to be discouraged except by the exhibition of great and brutal violence. In fact, bass will not be induced to decently decease by any civilized process short of a powerful shock from a voltaic pile administered in the region of their _medulla oblongata_. Of course, one cannot be expected to carry about a voltaic pile and go hunting for the medullary recesses of a savage and turbulent fish. On the other