THE PERCH FAMILY. 79 



pensation of Providence the Percoids should become extinct, 

 there would hardly be sport left to the anglers, who fish the 

 numerous creeks, rivers, and lakes where they now abound. 



I have alluded on another page, to the replenishing of the 

 lakelets, found so abundantly scattered along the margin of 

 the Mississippi, through its alluvial bottom lands, by the 

 occasional overflow of that river. This phenomenon is 

 strongly presented to the notice of observing anglers in the 

 neighborhood of St. Louis, and one is apt to wonder where 

 the great numbers and varieties of the Perch family come 

 from, to stock these sluggish waters. In thinking over the 

 matter I have fallen back on my favorite theory, the instinctive 

 migration of surplus production, as applicable to fresh- water 

 fishes, as well as to salt water or pelagian genera. 



If the reader will take the trouble to look at a good map, 

 he will see that the states north and west of the confluence 

 of the Mississippi and Ohio, are threaded for thousands of 

 miles by rivers of gentle flow, and dotted with innumerable 

 lakelets, which, to a great extent, are the feeders and sources 

 of the Mississippi. These are the breeding places of Bass, 

 Crappie, and other Percoids ; most of them spawn early in 

 the spring, soon after the ice has left the lakelets ; and as 

 most fresh-water species instinctively run down stream after 

 spawning, it is easily conjectured how large schools of these 

 fish are hurried along by freshets, and deposited in the ponds 

 that are fed by the overflow of the great river. 



After a rise in the Mississippi, the lakes and ponds that 

 skirt its course, above the mouth of the Ohio, and down 

 through the regions of cotton and sugar, are filled with fish 

 of this family. 



In the ponds which have been replenished in this way in 

 the neighborhood of St. Louis, their numbers decrease very 

 little the first summer ; the second season they spawn and 



