316 WHITMAN AND EYCLESHYMER. [VoL. XII. 
The statement that the male takes its brood to the shore in 
order ¢o sun itself and them would adorn a nursery tale better 
than the Proceedings of an Academy of Sciences. Dr. Fiille- 
born does not appear to have discovered that Amia prefers the 
shadows of evening and the darkness of night to the glare of 
the sun. Amia places its nest near the shore for warmth, not 
for light; it leads its young along the shore for food,* not for 
basking in sunlight. It is towards evening and in the early 
morning that the swarms of young may be seen to best advan- 
tage. As they grow older and more wary they may shift their 
feeding-ground, not to deep water, but to new places along the 
shore. Their seeming to disappear is accounted for by the 
fact that the individuals of a brood wander more widely apart 
as they grow older and require more food, and at the same time 
they become increasingly shy, and hide themselves beneath the 
banks, or whatever lies nearest, long before a boat in motion 
can be brought within seeing distance. The boat must come 
to rest and the observer must sit motionless by the half-hour if 
he desires to see young Amiae feeding in June. A slight jar 
of the water is enough to send hundreds of these young fish 
out of sight in a flash. 
The mistake in supposing that young Amiae retreat to deep 
water soon after June 1 led Dr. Fiilleborn quite astray on 
another point of considerable importance. The conclusion 
that the young go straight on to become more and more like 
the adult in both form and color is about as wide of the mark 
as it could be. The changes in color exhibited at different 
ages during the summer and autumn are as characteristic and 
remarkable as the changes in plumage among birds. 
Dr. Fiilleborn is careful to note that the young larvae with 
large yolk-sacs, before leaving the nest, have a distant resem- 
blance to tadpoles, but he neglects to mention that this resem- 
blance becomes even more striking after the yolk-sac has 
disappeared and after the nest has been abandoned. The 
larvae, shortly after leaving the nest, while moving about in a 
dense swarm, resemble tadpoles so closely in form, color, and 
* The food of the young consists mainly of daphnia and cypris, as Dr. Ayers 
informs us. 
