168 PICKEREL. 



CHAPTEK 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, Lucio 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. Nor 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 



