The Life of the Fish 2 
nati, among the low wooded hills from which clear brooks flow 
over gravelly bottoms toward the Ohio River. Here we will catch 
sunfishes of certain species, or maybe rock bass or catfish: any 
of these will do for our purpose. But one of our sunfishes is 
especially beautiful—mottled blue and golden and scarlet, with 
a long, black, ear-like appendage backward from his gill-covers— 
and this one we will keep and hold for our first lesson in fishes. 
It is a small fish, not longer than your hand most likely, but it 
can take the bait as savagely as the best, swimming away with 
it with such force that you might think from the vigor of its 
pull that you have a pickerel or a bass. But when it comes out 
of the water you see a little, flapping, unhappy, living plate of 
Fig. 2.—Long-eared Sunfish, Lepomis megalotis (Rafinesque). (From Clear Creek, 
Bloomington, Indiana,) Family Centrarchide. 
brown and blue and orange, with fins wide-spread and eyes 
red with rage. 
Form of the Fish—And now we have put the fish into a 
bucket of water, where it lies close to the bottom. Then we take 
it home and place it in an aquarium, and for the first time we 
have a chance to see what it is like. We see that its body is 
almost elliptical in outline, but with flat sides and shaped on the 
lower parts very much like a boat. This form we see is such as 
to enable it to part the water as it swims. We notice that its 
progress comes through the sculling motion of its broad, flat tail. 
