GAME FISH. 



CHAPTEK I. 



INSTRUCTION. 



I HAVE always considered a preface or introduction a 

 species of apology, and not intending that the following 

 sketches shall need any apology, I shall write no intro- 

 duction ; but an explanation of the scientific distinctions 

 and divisions of fishes may not only be appropriate but 

 highly instructive, if my readers be as ignorant as I 

 think them. 



It has been a matter of serious reproach by the 

 naturalists against the sportsmen, that the latter, instead 

 of adopting a uniform nomenclature, call a bird or fish 

 in one section of our country by a different name from 

 that under which it is known in another; that a Quail 

 and Black Bass at the North become a Partridge and 

 Trout at the South. The sportsmen, conscious of the 

 justness of the reproach, have submitted quietly to the 

 learned stones of reproof hurled at them, and scarcely 

 dared to suggest that their persecutors lived in the most 

 fragile of glass houses ; that naturalists were liable to 



