278 FISHES OF ILLINOIS 



mostly by line-fishing. "As a game fish, the yellow perch can be 

 commended chiefly on account of the fact that anybody can catch it. 

 It can be taken with hook and line any month in the year, and with 

 any sort of bait, — grasshoppers, angleworms, grubs, small minnows, 

 pieces of mussel, or pieces of fish ; and it will even rise, and freely, too, 

 o'n occasion, to the artificial fly ; * * * It is easily taken 

 through the ice in winter, when small minnows are the best bait." 

 A State Laboratory assistant some years ago made an experiment 

 at simple and inexpensive fishing for the yellow perch from a pier at 

 South Chicago. With a piece of lath for a pole, a line of cotton 

 twine, a small hook, and a bit of pork for his first bait, he caught a 

 single perch, cut this up as bait for others, and within an hour had a 

 string of seventy-five. 



Subfamily ETHEOSTOMIN^) 



(the darters) 



The darters have long been a favorite group with students of 

 American fishes. Peculiar to this country,* in which the subfamily 

 has a great development, interesting in their variety, their habits, 

 and their relations to nature, and especially attractive by reason of 

 their graceful forms, their relatively minute size, their brilliant color- 

 ation, and the exquisite detail and finish of their structural equip- 

 ment, they are to the fishes of North America what the humming- 

 birds are to South American birds. They seem not to be so much 

 dwarfed as concentrated fishes, each embodying in small space all 

 the complexity, spirit, and activity of a perch or a wal'-eyed pike. 



As a group, they are most likely to be found in comparatively 

 swift and rocky streams, being especially adapted to these situations 

 by their small size, their large paired fins, their pointed heads, and 

 their habit of resting on the bottom or, in ^some cases, of burying 

 themselves in sand, — all of which are means of maintaining them- 

 selves in swift currents, and of securing from among and under stones 

 the insect larvas and crustaceans on which they mainly depend for 

 food. They swim mainly by means of their pectoral fins, making quick 

 dashes in the current as a bird might make a short, rapid flight against 

 a high wind, and resting in the intervals upon their extended ventral 

 and anal fins. Unlike most of the taxonomic groups we have hitherto 



*Small percoids of Europe belonging to the genus Aspro and found in the Danube 

 are of larger size than the American darters, and are thought by most writers to 

 have been independently derived from European percoid stock, and not to be, 

 genetically related to the American Etheostomincc. 



