CHARACTERISTICS AND IDENTITY OF LAKE SALMON. 113 



Professor Louis Agassiz. They were the first ones he had ever seen. After a careful 

 examination he pronounced them to be landlocked salmon. One of the specimens is 

 preserved in the Agassiz Museum at Cambridge. Several years after, on the occasion 

 of my first visit to the St. Marguerite, I captured two fish which I at once recognized 

 as identical with my earUer acquaintance at the Grand Lake stream. As to the difference 

 between grilse and ouananiche, I can only speak as to their external appearance, never 

 having dissected a specimen of either. This is very marked, as the eye of the ouananiche 

 is much the larger, the profile rounder, the dark spots larger and much more numerous. 

 The body at the juncture with the caudal is broader and flatter, and the head larger in pro- 

 portion to the body. [Italics the present writer's.] In fact, the grilse is much more of an 

 aristocrat than his fresh-water cousin, being finer in his proportions and much purer in 

 color — due, no doubt, to his different habitat and food." 



'The above and other variations that have been from time to time reported in either 

 the Canadian or American ouananiche are not sufficient to mark it as a distinct sub- 

 species of Salmo salar!' 



From the foregoing varied and variable opinions, it is seen that we have a race of 

 fish in certain Canadian waters which has been, for the most part at least, recognized 

 as ouananiche since time immemorial. Also in more recently discovered Canadian 

 waters for some reason the fish still is recognized as ouananiche. As previously stated, 

 the white inhabitants of Nova Scotia to this day designate the fish as grayUng. The 

 old white residents of the St. Croix region, there called it 'shiner,' and pecuharly, if 

 not significantly, the Indians of the western St. Croix region in Maine, according to 

 A. Leith Adams, as previously mentioned, called it by a name sounding something Uke 

 Onnenook, and according to Atkins the same Indians called it tag-e-wah-nahn. Have 

 these Indian names any relation to ouananiche through ouanan and diminutive gut- 

 teral such as 'ich' or 'och?' 



While the fact that a fish has been described and had a name of Latin form bestowed 

 upon it does not necessarily indicate its identity with, or distinctness from, some other 

 fish likewise described and named, it does indicate that there are recognizable differences 

 from other forms so described and named so far as the individuals observed are con- 

 cerned. The more individuals there are observed the more likely are the stated differ- 

 ences to be substantiated or to disappear. 



Now we have discussed one or more groups of fishes which apparently from prehistoric 

 times have been recognized as so different from another group of fishes as to have had 

 bestowed upon them both by Indian and white settlers, distinctive names. Those people 

 were acquainted with large aggregations of individuals. Then enters the 'trained 

 ichthyologist' who, by observations upon a hmited number of both forms, recognizes 

 differences which to him are of specific significance. So Dr. Charles Girard (1854, p. 

 380) of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1853, described a fish from Sebago Lake ('South- 

 ern part of Maine') and named it Salmo sebago. For reasons previously mentioned, 

 this fact is principally of taxonomic importance only. To repeat what has been said in 

 other words, if the Sebago fish is absolutely identical with the sea salmon, the name 



