54 PHILOLOGY OF THE OTJANANICHE 



In concluding a paper upon the philology of the 

 ouananiche for the May, 1894, meeting of the Royal 

 Society of Canada, I made the following appeal : 

 " The gentle Izaak claims our admiration and respect 

 by the purity of his language no less than by his in- 

 timacy with fish and fishing; and from the refining 

 influences of the gentle art, and even from the refine- 

 ment of nature that inspires the love of it, I am per- 

 suaded that one has only to point out to the angling 

 community, and to those who contribute to its litera- 

 ture, the claims of the original name of the ouana- 

 niche, to insure at the hands of so cultured a constit- 

 uency a due recognition of what Dr. Henshall so 

 admirably terms, in discussing a cognate subject, 'the 

 inflexible law of priority.' r 



Coming now to the pronunciation of "ouananiche," 

 and referring to what I have already had occasion to 

 say elsewhere on the subject, I cannot, perhaps, do 

 better than to quote the following from Mr. A. Nel- 

 son Cheney's "Angling Notes" in Forest and Stream 

 of April 7, 1894 : 



"Judge S. H. Greene writes me : ' Through the columns of For- 

 est and Stream will you kindly educate us of the " wild and woolly 

 West " in the pronunciation of the name of that game-fish of yours 

 of the East, " ouananiche ?" Many of us who boldly, without the 

 least hesitation, talk freely about Skamokawa, the capital of Wahi- 

 akum County; Humptulipe, Semiahoo, Stillaquamish, Wa Wawai, 

 etc., hedge on the word ouananiche by simply spelling it, leaving 

 each auditor to mentally pronounce it to suit himself, or, at most, 

 stammering out something so entirely unsatisfactory that the at- 

 tempted pronunciation is invariably followed by the parenthetical 

 remark, "or however you pronounce it.'" 



" I am a little surprised that this question was not asked long 

 ago by some one of somebody, for common as this rather queer- 



