168 PICKEREL. 
CHAPTER XY. 
PICKEREL. 
In some remarkable and incomprehensible manner the 
good old name of Pike has fallen into disuse, and is now 
applied in this country to a fish that is not a pike at all, 
but a perch, Liicio perca, the Pike Perch, Big-eyed Pike, 
or Glass Eye of the Lakes ; while the name Pickerel, 
which is merely the diminutive of Pike, is appropriated 
to the most gigantic and ferocious monsters of the deep. 
There is no fish whose appearance is more appalling, and 
whose appetite is more ravenous than the Great Northern 
Pickerel, which is alleged to attain a weight of twenty 
pounds, and which, in its fury, will pounce upon and 
swallow almost any small moving object. ]^or does it 
much surpass the common pickerel of our ponds, which 
has very similar habits, and sometimes weighs as high as 
ten pounds. 
The pickerel family, like most of the fish of America, 
have never been properly classified by the scientific, nor 
named by the vulgar. In fact, they, with the exception 
of the mascallonge, appear to have no specific names in 
common parlance, while naturalists have vague or no 
acquaintance with their peculiarities. Sportsmen and 
others speak of catching pickerel, whether it be in the 
St. Lawrence, Great Northern Pickerel, which seem to 
