landing him in the boat. In the next season
the same fisherman caught a trout weighing eighteen pounds. So far as
authentic records go, these two trout are the largest fish ever caught
in the lake with hook and line.

The conditions in Otsego Lake are favorable for the artificial
propagation of fish, and many plantings have been made, at first by
private enterprise, and afterward by the State. The lake extends in a
direction from N. N. East to S. S. West about nine miles, varying in
width from about three quarters of a mile to a mile and a half. The
surface of the lake is 1,194 feet above tide-water. The average depth is
about fifty feet, although about two miles north of the village
soundings have been taken to a depth of one hundred and fifty feet,
while toward the midst of the lake the depths are greater. In many
places the water deepens gradually from the shore, but along the eastern
bank there are points at which, Fenimore Cooper declared, "a large ship
might float with her yards in the forest." The lake is chiefly supplied
from cold bottom springs. Its only constant tributaries are two small
streams, whose entire volume is not half that of its outlet, the
Susquehanna River, which here begins its long journey to Chesapeake Bay.
The upper and lower portions of the lake, being shallow and weedy,
afford ample pickerel grounds, while the middle portion and whole
eastern shore are admirably adapted, by deep water and soft marl bottom,
to the coregoni and salmon trout, and nearer shore, by rocky bottom and
sharp ledges, to the rock bass, black bass, and yellow perch. Large fish
find an abundant food supply in the "lake shiner," an exquisitely
beautiful creature and dainty morsel, about four inches long.

The fish for which the lake has become famous among epicures is the
"Otsego bass." In _The Pioneers_, published in 1823, Fenimore Cooper
expressed the general opinion when he put into the mouth of one of his
characters this eulogy of the Otsego bass: "These fish are of a quality
and flavor that in other countries would make them esteemed a luxury on
the tables of princes. The world has no better fish than the bass of
Otsego; it unites the richness of the shad to the firmness of the
salmon." More than sixty years later much the same opinion prevailed,
when Elihu Phinney described Otsego bass as "beyond all peradventure the
very finest fresh water fish that swims."

There has long been a difference of opinion as to whet