=The Long-eared Sunfish.=--If we would understand a fish, we must first go and catch one. This is not very hard to do, for there are plenty of them in the little rushing brook or among the lilies of the pond. Let us take a small hook, put on it an angleworm or a grasshopper,--no need to seek an elaborate artificial fly,--and we will go out to the old "swimming-hole" or the deep eddy at the root of the old stump where the stream has gnawed away the bank in changing its course. Here we will find fishes, and one of them will take the bait very soon. In one part of the country the first fish that bites will be different from the first one taken in some other. But as we are fishing in the United States, we will locate our brook in the centre of population of our country. This will be to the northwest of Cincinnati, 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 brown and blue and orange, with fins wide-spread and eyes red with rage.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Long-eared Sunfish, _Lepomis megalotis_ (Rafinesque). (From Clear Creek, Bloomington, Indiana.) Family _Centrarchidæ_.]
=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.