Wagner—Fish Fauna of Lake Pepin . 25 
gauges at Lake City and at many points on the Mississippi 
above and below. 
This lake, it sems to me, offers a very favorable place for the 
prosecution of a systematic biological survey. I know of no 
other lake in the Mississippi valley of which the physical fea¬ 
tures are so well known. There remains, however, even here, 
much work to he done on temperatures and other features. 
Furthermore a thorough study of this lake is highly de¬ 
sirable, for, as I hope my notes on the fishes will show, it is 
a great field for commercial fisheries, and by proper procedure 
its importance could be further increased. It seems to me 
that it would be well worth while to experiment with the in¬ 
troduction here of certain food fishes now not existing here, 
especially of certain whitefish; so far as I am able to 
ascertain, no such experiments have ever been made. In Lake 
St. Croix, somewhat further north, at the mouth of the St. 
Croix River, the United States Fish Commission planted two 
million whitefish fry in 1891-2 ( Kept . U. S. F. C., vol. 18, p. 
lxxxiii). In 1892-3 it planted in the same lake two thou¬ 
sand three hundred yearlings of lake trout ( Rept . U. S. F . 
C., vol. 19, p. 134). Lake St. Croix is a smaller and de¬ 
cidedly shallower body of water than Lake Pepin. Yet an oc¬ 
casional report of the capture of a lake trout in this region of 
the Mississippi seems to indicate that the experiment was not 
entirely a failure. A repetition of it in Lake Pepin, with due 
care in details and followed persistently for several years, 
would very probably prove a success. 
It is as a first contribution toward a biological survey of 
Lake Pepin that I offer the following notes on its fish fauna. 
In the summer of 1903, the writer spent two weeks at Lake 
City, Minnesota, engaged in collecting certain anatomical 
material. In 1904, he spent nearly three months at the same 
place, as an employe of the United States Bureau of Fisheries, 
studying the biology of Polyodon. During both periods, col¬ 
lections and notes of the fishes occurring here were made, as 
time allowed. During both periods he made much use of the 
aid, freely given, of Mr. Christ. Schnell, of Read’s Landing, 
Minnesota, a man who has fished in these waters for many 
