288 FISHING IN AMERICAN WATERS. 



In Europe it is found desirable to cultivate this fish, as it 

 is very prolific and an excellent pan-fish; but in America, 

 where it is no trick to take half a bushel a day on the ponds 

 in the immediate vicinity of the city of New York, it is not 

 deemed worth while to encourage its propagation. Indeed, 

 so great a scourge is it regarded on Long Island, that poach- 

 ers having a grudge against an owner of a trout-pond go in 

 the night-time and stock it with perch. 



Of the fishes belonging to this order there are over twenty 

 families, including the numerous kinds of bass, and nearly all 

 of those fishes of fresh waters with the first dorsal spiked or 

 spinous rayed. Of these families there is scarcely a fresh- 

 water river or lake on earth which does not contain a repre- 

 sentative. 



The ovarium of a perch is one fourth the weight of the 

 fish ; and a pound perch has been known to contain 992,000 

 eggs. 



THE GLASS-EYED OR WALL-EYED PIKE. 



This is one of the fishes of the Middle and Northern States. 

 At the Southwest it is called wall-eyed, while at the North it 

 is known as the glass-eyed pike, and by other local and un- 

 important names, such as the pike-perch, sand-pike, etc. But 

 its eyes being the most distinctive mark, it is more generally 

 known by the names given at the heading than by any other. 

 It sometimes attains to a very great weight. Doctor Buel 

 took one in the Kentucky River which weighed nearly fifty 

 pounds. 



They are found in all the tributaries of the Ohio River, in 

 the range of great lakes, and most of the rivers and lakes as 

 far east as New York, south as far as Tennessee, and west as 

 far as Wisconsin. They also inhabit many of the waters in 

 the western part of the Dominion of Canada. In Cayuga, 

 Seneca, and other lakes of the western part of New York they 

 are often taken, sometimes weighing as high as forty pounds. 

 In Oneida Lake they are numerous ; in fact, the glass-eyed 



