I 



130 AMERICAN FISHES. 



like velvet pile. Of the gill-covers, the operculuin is very narrow, 

 its transverse diameter being scarcely half its height. The suboper- 

 culum exceeds the half of its length in height. 



The Masamacush of the Mingan river, which is the fish in its 

 normal form, according to Dr. Richardson, from whom this account 

 is abridged, has ten gill-rays on one side, eleven on the other ; dorsal 

 fin-rays twelve, pectoral thirteen, ventral eight, anal ten, and caudal 

 nineteen. 



The back and sides of this fish are intermediate between olive 

 green and clove brown, bestudded with yellowish gray spots as big as 

 a pea. A few of these spots on the gill-covers. Belly and under 

 jaw white ; the latter dotted thinly with bluish gray. 



The Arctic fish is brighter in color ; the back and sides being 

 purple, the spots distinctly yellow, and the sides, below the lateral 

 line, tinged with a flush of lake. 



Before proceeding to the Grayling, which, though of this family, is 

 not a proper Salmon, but of the subgenus Thymallus^ I will observe 

 that the opinion which I hazarded in my introductory remarks con- 

 cerning the existence of a distinct Salmon in Sebago lake, near Port- 

 land, in Maine, known as the Sebago Trout, and which I proposed to 

 designate as Salmo Sebago, is fully carried out by the information 

 which I have received since writing those remarks, from a thorough 

 sportsman, well acquainted with all the described species. 



He assures me that the waters of that lake did contain a Salmon 

 closely resembling the Salmo Salar, but which has in all probability 

 become extinct. At the date of his writing, he was about to set forth 

 on a visit to the lake, and should a fish be procurable, I shall receive 

 it, although not in time to include it in the body of the work, at least 

 in season to be embodied in the appendix. 



