50 



beds of the river, more or less completely cut off from the present chan- 

 nel by silting up at either end. or tliey are similar portions of old beds 



of tributary streams. 



Quiver lake, in v/liich the headquarters boat was placed, is such a por- 

 tion of the river bed. It varies in length (when the water is low enough 

 to define it clearly) from one ard a half to two and a half miles, and has 

 a usual width of about five hundred feet at low water mark. It lies 

 nearly parallel with the main river, into which it opens, even in the 

 lowest stage of water, at its lower or southern end. by about half its 

 greatest width. At its upper end it receives Quiver creek, a stream some 

 twenty to thirty feet across, which comes down for several miles across 

 the sandy plateau, receiving some distance above its mouth the drainage 

 of a region formerly filled with swamps. This lake lies at the foot of the 

 sandy bluff and is separated from the river on the west by a narrow 

 tongue of low black land, either bare or covered with trees, according to 

 its height above the usual water level. 



Thompson's lake lies wholly within the bottom-lands of the main river 

 and its banks are consequently everywhere low and flat. It is five miles 

 in length by about half a mile in width at an average midsummer stage. 

 When the water is moderately high, it can be entered by skiffs from 

 either end, but as the river falls the lake is shut off below and connects 

 with the stream only by a somewhat tortuous narrow channel about two 

 miles in length at the northern end. Neither this nor Quiver lake ever 

 goes dry, the water in the deepest places being not less than three and 

 a half or four feet during tlie dryest seasons. Phelps lake, on the other 

 hand, is a pond about half a mile long by a fourth as wide, having neither 

 inlet nor outlet after the overflow has receded, rarely drying up entirely, 

 but not infrequently being reduced to a few shallow pools. It is com- 

 pletely surrounded by a bottom-land forest, and its bed is a mere shallow 

 depression in the mud. 



Beside our regular station work, occasional collections were made from 

 various other waters, including Spoon river. Matanzas lake — three and a 

 half miles l)elow Havana, on the eastern side of tlie river— Clear lake. 

 Dogfish lake, Mud lake. Liverpool lake and Quiver creek. 



At each of the above regular stations thoroughgoing collections and 

 careful observations were made at intervals of from one to three weeks, 

 the time varying according to the nature of the station and the teach- 

 ings of our experience. The mid-stream and mid-lake collections were of 

 two kinds, qualitative and quantitative: the former made at surface and 

 bottom with towing net and dredge, and the latter with a plankton net 

 of the finest bolting cloth (Xo. 20[ hauled from top to bottom at a regu- 

 lar and uniform rate and over identical distances. As the waters in which 

 we worked were much too shallow for profitable vertical hauls— often not 

 more than five or six feet in depth — we tightly stretched a line one hun- 

 dred feet long obliquely from bottom to surface and drew the quantita- 

 tive net along this line, to which it was suspended in a horizontal posi- 

 tion by a carriage running along the line on wheels. The contents of 

 the dredge were assorted" by the aid of a set of bag sieves of netting 

 and of finer cloth, fitted closely together as one apparatus by pushing 

 the ring of one net inside that of another, the longest and finest bag 

 being, of course, at the botton, and the shortest and coarsest at the top 

 of the set. In the long-shore work we used hand nets of various sorts, 

 the cone dredge of Professor Birge (commonly called the "Birge net"" by 

 us), sieves, forceps, and fingers, and occasionally a small minnow seine. 



Everything collected was bottled and labeled after such luethodical 

 preparation as the case required, with the exception of the common and 

 constant sorts, like the more abundant mollusks and insect larv*. Con- 

 cerning these, full notes of abundance, etc.. were kept for each station 

 at each visit. 



Besides these regular collecting operations, the water temperatures 

 were taken daily, a great variety of notes were made on relative num- 

 bers, habitat, habits, life histories, food, and behavior of aquatic and 



