PLATE LIT. 
jelly, which renders them the favourite food of the smaller kinds of fishes. 
’The Perch is so tenacious of life, that it will live many hours, or 
even two, three, or four days, after being taken out of the water, and 
may be easily transported alive, with proper care, to any distance not 
exceeding sixty or eighty miles. Perch of six or seven inches in 
length are esteemed of good size for the table, but in many waters 
where they are suffered to remain unmolested they become much 
larger. The biggest we have seen was one taken in the Great Pool 
of iTala, or Pimblemere, near North Wales, that weighed almost five 
pounds. \Vc have also caught them in the Dee, near its junction 
with that Pool, of a large size, though much inferior in that respect 
to the fish abovementioned. Mr. Pennant speaks of one that was 
taken in the Serpentine River, Hyde Park, that weighed nine pounds, 
but this writer intimates, that Perch of such magnitude arc very un- 
common, The Author of the Angler’s Sure Guide says, he once 
saw the figure of a Perch drawn with a pencil on the door of a 
house near Oxford, that was twenty-nine inches long, and was in- 
formed ii was the true dimension of a Perch then living *. In the 
lakes among the mountains of Lapland and Siberia, the Perch is often 
found of a monstrous size. Bloch assures us, that in one of the 
churches in Lapland, the dried head of a Perch caught in a contiguous 
river is preserved as a curiosity, and such it may very truly be consi- 
dered, that part alone measuring almost twelve inches in length. The 
enormous fish to which this head belonged when living, may be esti- 
mated in length at between four and five feet. 
An accidental variety of the species called the crooked, or hump- 
backed Perch, having the back more elevated near the first dorsal fin> 
* P. Ian. 
