The Days of a Man 1875 



member back to the days of tag alders, yellow cow- 

 slips, and angleworms on a pin hook, will recall his 

 first acquaintance with a Johnny Darter. There lay 

 a little fish, apparently asleep, on the bottom of the 

 stream, half hidden under a stone or leaf, his tail 

 bent round it as if for support against the current. 

 But when you put a finger down, the bent tail 

 straightened, and you next spied him resting a few 

 feet away, head upstream. Nothing had seemed 

 easier than to catch him, but somehow you failed. 



Not to know the Johnny Darters is to miss a real 

 joy of boy life. All of them are very little some 

 less than two inches long and the largest only six 

 or eight at most. They are, nevertheless, the most 

 graceful in form, and many of them the most brilliant 

 in color, of all fresh-water fishes. 



In our second paper we undertook to identify the 

 f orms named in 1820 by Constantine Rafinesque, the 

 first student of Western fishes, in his "Ichthyologia 

 Ohiensis," where he described hastily, carelessly, and 

 enthusiastically the various species he had found in 

 the brooks about Louisville. While we were thus 

 engaged, the unique personality of the man himself 

 intrigued us mightily. And some short account of 

 him may be not unwelcome here. 



Rafinesque was born in Constantinople of a 

 French father and a German mother. At Marseilles, 

 in early youth, his future career was blocked out 

 along two lines : 



It was among the flowers and fruits of that delightful region 

 that I first began to enjoy life, and I became a botanist. After- 

 wards, the first prize I received in school was a book of animals, 

 and I became a zoologist and a naturalist. . . . Linne, grand 

 genie, j'ai choisi pour guide. 



