34 FISHING IN AMERICAN WATERS. 



The large tongue in the carp may have been providentially 

 furnished to give it a more acute taste for preventing it from 

 being poisoned by eating water hemlock, or other deleterious 

 plants, as it is known to feed on water-plants. That all fish 

 are not thus provided^with taste sufficiently acute to enable 

 them to reject what is poisonous, appears from the practice 

 of poachers in poisoning fish by pulverizing and making a 

 paste of fisher's berries, or Cocculus indicus, which they form 

 into balls .about the size -of peas and cast into the water. 

 Fish greedily swallow these, and, becoming intoxicated or 

 palsied thereby, float to the surface of the water and are eas- 

 ily caught, or soon die. Chub and dace are ready victims 

 to this device, as are also the black bass, Oswego, yellow, 

 white, rock, and all the varieties of lake and river bass. It 

 is always dangerous to purchase fish out of season any 

 where ; but residents of cities should be especially careful 

 who they purchase from, and the safest houses are those w^hich 

 deal largely with fishing firms of established reputation. 



Teeth of fishes appear destined more especially for laying 

 hold and detaining their prey than for chewing. With this 

 view they are bent inward, like tenter-hooks, so that fishes, 

 howsoever small and slippery, are forced back into the gul- 

 let, and their escape or return prevented. It is no doubt 

 with the same design that the throats of many fish are stud- 

 ded with what M. Bory St. Vincent terms a pavement of 

 teeth. Such fishes as have teeth thus placed far back on the 

 palate and upper part of the throat, while in their jaws they 

 have none, are termed by anglers "leather-mouthed," but 

 technically malacostomata. 



Anglers of the British Isles reckon among the principal of 

 leather -mouthed fishes the minnow, gudgeon, roach, loach, 

 bleak, chub, daces, barbel, bream, rud, tench, carp, and other 

 minor fishes. The salmon and the pike have teeth in the 

 jaws and in all parts of the mouth, and the perch in all parts 

 of the mouth except the tongue. The sturgeon and sucker, 

 again, have no teeth whatever. 



