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THE LARGE-MOUTH BASS. 



THE BLACK BASSES. 



Fishing, if I, a fisher, may protest 



Of pleasure is the sweetest, of sports the hest 



Of exercises the most excellent ; 



Of recreation the most innocent, 



But now the sport is marde, andwott ye why. 



Fishes decrease and fishers multiply. De Piscations , 1598. 



TTNTIL recently, we supposed that there were many kinds of Black 

 Basses. Different communities christened them to their own liking, 

 and naturalists, misled by the numerous popular names, described, as dis- 

 tinct, forms which, had they been seen side by side, they would have con- 

 sidered the same. Twenty-two separately named species are on record. 

 In 1873, Prof. Gill, after studying specimens gathered from all parts 

 of the United States by the Smithsonian Institution, came to the decision 

 that there were only two species, the Large-mouthed and the Small-mouthed 

 bass. This was easy work for so accomplished an ichthyologist as Gill, 

 but the difficulty was to determine the ownership of the many names 

 already established in the literature of ichthyology. After five years of 

 uncertainty, and several changes, thirteen of these have been allotted to 

 the Small-mouth, and the remainder of nine to its cousin with the long jaw. 

 The oldest name for the Large-mouth is Microptei-tis salmoides, and for the 

 Small -mouth, as Henshall has proved, Micropterus Dolomiei : it is hoped 

 that this decision, which is grounded upon a firm foundation of priority, 

 maybe permitted to stand unchanged. Gill's paper, in which he defines 

 the differences between the two species, was published in 1873 in the Pro- 

 ceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 



