1 72 THE BRITISH ANGLER'S LEXICON. 



hundred and fifty thousand. The body of the perch is 

 deep, and the back heavily arched. The mouth is very 

 large, and has numerous teeth set in the roof and the jaws. 

 The colours are beautiful, the back and well down the sides 

 being of a deep green, marked with distinct upright bars of 

 a black colour ; the belly is white, sometimes tinged with 

 pink. The perch has a distinguishing feature in the dorsal 

 fin, which is spinous and flexible, and from the powerful 

 spines which it possesses, causes this fish to be dreaded by 

 all the other denizens of the water. 



PePCh, Fishing" for. There are various modes 

 employed in capturing perch. The most commonly used 

 is the live minnow, either attached to a single hook and 

 fastened to a float, or with the paternoster (q.v.} style of 

 tackle. When a perch attacks the bait, he does it in a 

 nibbling, half-hearted sort of way, so that, although the float 

 keeps bobbing up and down, yet this is no sign that the bait 

 has been swallowed. Better to allow time, and when it sails- 

 away under water, strike then. They can be fished for with 

 a spinning minnow or a small spoon, and this is a very 

 successful plan in lakes and ponds where perch abound. A 

 good lively red worm is as good a bait as any for still perch 

 fishing, and very much used by the rural anglers in the deep 

 reaches of rivers where they are. A gloomy, blowy day is 

 a good one to fish for perch in. They swim in shoals, and 

 if you get into one of these, and catch one fish, there is 

 almost a certainty of getting nearly the whole crowd, one 

 after the other. Perch will take a gaudy fly with plenty of 

 tinsel about it, but it is uncertain when they would be in the 

 humour to do so, consequently a fly is seldom used for them. 

 When worm fshing for perch, it is useful to throw in 

 occasionally a hardful of troken worms this puts them 



