DESCBIPTION, CLASSIFICATION, AND 

 HABITS OF THE OUANANICHE 



THE ouananiche is the salmon of a number of the 

 inland waters of northern and eastern Canada, near- 

 ly all of which have direct communication with the 

 sea. Careful observation tends to the belief that it 

 very seldom descends to salt water. But its fresh- 

 water habitat the whole year round being from choice 

 rather than necessity, the common practice of speak- 

 ing of it as a landlocked salmon is simply a common 

 error. Landlocked it assuredly is not, at all events, in 

 any portion of the Lake St. John country, where all 

 the waters that it inhabits communicate with those of 

 the lower St. Lawrence by way of the Saguenay. The 

 familiar story of the Lake St. John ouananiche, shut 

 out from the sea by some extraordinary upheaval of 

 nature in the bed of the Saguenay, is, of course, en- 

 tirely apocryphal, for water never yet flowed that 

 smolt could not descend, and it has still to be estab- 

 lished that the Saguenay was ever dry. Professor G. 

 Brown Goode* refers to a somewhat similar claim 

 on the part of some investigators, that landlocked 

 salmon did not exist in certain regions of Maine and 

 New Brunswick, in which they are now found, until 



* Goode's American Fishes, p. 445. 



