THE FISHES OF THE LAKE OF THE WOODS AND CONNECTING WATERS. By Barton Warren Evermann and Homer Barker Latimer, Of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, Washington, D. C. The fish fauna of the Lake of the Woods and its tributary waters is but little known. Very little faunal work has been done on those waters. In 1894 Prof. Albert J. Woolman, then of Duluth, Minnesota, now of Urbana, Illinois, and Prof. Ulysses O. Cox, then of the State Normal School at Mankato, Minnesota, now of the Indiana State Nor-mal School at Terre Haute, Indiana, spent several days on Lake of the Woods, where they made the only considerable collections of fishes that have ever been obtained in that region. These collections were made under the direction of the Rathbun-Wakeham Joint Commis-sion relative to the Preservation of the Fisheries in waters contiguous to Canada and the United States. No formal report of the work done by Woolman and Cox has been published. No list of the fishes occurring in the Lake of the Woods has ever been printed. In August, 1908, and again in 1909, the International Fisheries Commission visited Ramy Lake and Lake of the Woods and obtained specimens of some of the food fishes as well as much valuable data concerning the fisheries of those waters. In October, 1908, Dr. S. E. Meek, of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, visited Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake in connection with the work of the International Fisheries Commission. He collected a considerable number of specimens of the food fishes and some information concerning the fisheries of those waters. These collections and notes have been examined by the present writers, who have also studied the Woolman and Cox collections (now in the U. S. National Museum) and all other available material from that region. Our grateful thanks are due to Mr. Paul Marschalk, of Warroad, and Capt. Arthur Jolmson, of Kenora, for valuable data regarding the commercial fisheries of the Lake of the Woods. To their courtesy we are indebted for most of the statistics of the fisheries, given in this paper. Proceedings U. S. National Museum, Vol. 39— No. 1778. 121
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