8 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION 



The literature dealing with the fishes of the Gulf of Maine begins with the 

 earliest descriptions of New England, for the fishery possibilities of the Gulf so 

 impressed the early voyagers, even prior to the first settlement, that almost all 

 accounts of their travels contain first-hand observations on the local abundance 

 of fish of one species or another. Capt. John Smith (1616), for instance, commented 

 on the abundance of sturgeon, cod, hake, haddock, cole (the American pollock), 

 cusk, sharks, mackerel, herring, cunners, eels, salmon, and bass in 1616, while 

 Wood (1634), in his " New England's Prospect," gives much interesting information, 

 some of which is quoted hereafter. It was not until the early part of the nineteenth 

 century that the sea fishes of northern New England and of the Maritime Provinces 

 began to attract scientific attention, but since then the local faunal lists for that 

 region have become numerous. The following, in chronological order, are the most 

 important of these: 



1850. — "Report on the sea and river fisheries of New Brunswick, within the Gulf of St. Law- 

 rence and Bay of Chaleur," by M. H. Perley. 137 pp., 1850. Fredericton. 



1853-1867. — "A history of the fishes of Massachusetts," by David Humphreys Storer. Mem- 

 oirs, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, New Series, Vol. V, pp. 49-92, 122-168, and 257-296; 

 Vol. VI, pp. 309-372; Vol. VIII, pp. 389-439; Vol. IX, pp. 217-256, 39 pis. (Also in book form 

 with supplement.) Cambridge and Boston. 



1879. — "A list of the fishes of Essex County, including those of Massachusetts Bay, according 

 to the latest results of the work of the U. S. Fish Commission," by George Brown Goode and Tarle- 

 ton H. Bean. Bulletin, Essex Institute, Vol. XI, No. 1, pp. 1-38. Salem. 



1884. — "Natural history of useful aquatic animals," by George Brown Goode and associates. 

 Section I, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, published jointly by the United 

 States Fish Commission and the United States Bureau of the Census. Washington. 



1908. — "Fauna of New England. 8. List of the Pisces," by William C. Kendall. Occasional 

 Papers, Boston Society of Natural History, Vol. VII, No. 8, April, 1908, pp. 1-152. Boston. 



1914. — "An annotated catalogue of the fishes of Maine," by William C. Kendall. Proceed- 

 ings, Portland Society of Natural History, Vol. Ill, 1914, Part 1, pp. 1-198. Portland. 



1922. — "The fishes of the Bay of Fundy," by A. G. Huntsman. Contributions to Canadian 

 Biology, 1921 (1922), No. 3, pp. 1-24. Ottawa. 



Either at first hand or by reference to the original sources these faunal lists 

 contain all the published locality records of the rarer species, while the last two, 

 with a paper by Gill (1905b), give complete ichthyological bibliographies respectively 

 for the coasts of Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and Massachusetts. A 

 similar list of the captures of deep-water forms along the outer part of the Conti- 

 nental Shelf is contained in Goode and Bean's "Oceanic Ichthyology " (1896). 



The most pertinent extralimital lists are Smith's (1898) and Sumner, Osburn, 

 and Cole's (1913) lists of Woods Hole fishes for the waters immediately to the west, 

 and Halket's (1913) check list of the fishes of Canada for those to the east and north 

 of the Gulf of Maine. With these readily available we have not thought it worth 

 while to burden the present paper with the authorities for localities except in the 

 more interesting cases. To save constant repetition we state here that almost all of 

 the information as to the Bay of Fundy given hereafter is drawn either from 

 Huntsman's paper or from his unpublished notes. Much information as to local 



