GAME FISH 
CHAPTEE I, 
rN"STRUCTION. 
I HAVE always considered a preface or introduction a 
species of apology, and not intending that tlie following 
sketches shall need any apology, I shall write no intro- 
duction ; but an explanation of the scientific distinctions 
and divisions of fishes may not only be appropriate but 
highly instructive, if my readers be as ignorant as I 
think them. 
It has been a matter of serious reproach by the 
naturalists against the sportsmen, that the latter, instead 
of adopting a uniform nomenclature, call a bird or fish 
in one section of our country by a different name from 
that under which it is known in another ; that a Quail 
and Black Bass at the IS^orth become a Partridge and 
Trout at the South. The sportsmen, conscious of the 
justness of the reproach, have submitted quietly to the 
learned stones of reproof hurled at them, and scarcely 
dared to suggest that their persecutors lived in the most 
fragile of glass houses ; that naturalists were liable to 
