ESOCID^. 



153 



erroneous, as I know tliem to be taken of great size, and remarkable 

 excellence, in Lake Huron. 



It is the boldest, fiercest, and most voracious of fresh-water fish ; and 

 there is none, unless it be the Great Lake Trout, that can offer any 

 adequate resistance to his attacks. It is said that even the spiny dor- 

 sals of the PercidcE do not protect them from his ravenous attacks. 



He bites daringly at a dead bait played with spinning-tackle, or 

 even with a simple gorge and trolling-hooks. He is, moreover, readily 

 taken with that murderous instrument, the spoon, or even by a bait 

 of tin or red cloth, made to play quickly through the water. 



Before passing to the next species, I cannot but pause to notice a 

 strange error of nomenclature, in Mr. Brown's comprehensive little 

 volume, " The American Angler's Manual," to which I have alluded 

 before, by which he transforms the term Esox^ the specific name of 

 every member of the Pike family, as assigned by Linnaeus, into the 

 Essex^ which he appears to conceive a distinctive term peculiar to the 

 Mascalonge, which he calls " the Essex or Muscalinga of our western 

 lakes." I note this error, not from any desire to underrate a useful 

 and valuable little book, but merely to guard against its adoption by 

 anglers in general. 



Note to Revised Edition. — The Mascalonge is, as I presumed above, and have 

 verified by personal observation, vastly more abundant, and infinitely larger, and in 

 all respects superior in Lake Huron to those in the lakes below ; indeed ihe superi- 

 ority of all kinds of fish in those cold, pure, deep waters, improving the farther you 

 go northward, to those in the muddy shallows of Lake Erie, cannot be believed until 

 it is learned by experience 



