81 
On the Food of Young Fishes. 
Amitdm. 
A single dog-fish (Amia), one and three-fourths inches 
long, taken in June, had eaten seventy per cent, of Ento- 
mostraca — about equally Copepoda and Cladocera — and 
two per cent, of larvae and pupae of Chironomus. A few 
young Allorchestes and some Corixas complete the brief 
list. 
Several specimens of Amia under one inch in length, 
whose anatomy I studied three years ago, I remember to 
have had their intestines packed with Entomostraca. 
Lepidostehxe. 
Here also I shall have to content myself with such 
hints of the food of the young as are given by two or 
three specimens, as the youngest are not yet common 
enough in our collections to supply more material for a 
study of their food. One of the two smallest gars exam- 
ined, an inch and a fourth in length, taken in June, near 
Peoria, had filled itself with Scapholeheris mucronata, 
and the other had taken only a minute fish. A specimen 
two inches long and only an eighth of an inch in depth, 
furnished a striking illustration of the voracity of this 
terror of our streams, as its stomach contained sixteen 
minute Cyprinoids. 
Summary . 
A sufficient recapitulation of the foregoing data is af- 
forded by the appended table of the food of the different 
genera. It may be worth while to say that all the material 
upon which the foregoing statements rest, as well as all 
that used in the preceding paper, has been carefully pre- 
served, and may be seen at any time by those interested, 
at the State Laboratory of Natural History. 
The general conclusion from these observations is the 
supreme importance of Entomostraca and the minute 
aquatic larvae of Diptera as food for nearly or quite all 
of our fresh-water fishes — a conclusion that gives these 
trivial and neglected creatures, of. whose very existence 
the majority of the people are scarcely aware, a promi- 
nent place among the most valuable animals of the State, 
