and the Maritime Provinces. 283 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

 ^OMEJNlCLtATUHE OF pISHES. 



By A. N. CHENEY. 



Any man, or body of men, who will engage in the work of bringing 

 some sort of order out of the present chaos of common names applied to 

 American fishes, will deserve well of his fellow-men who have occasion to 

 speak or write the names of those fishes, whether the men are anglers or 

 not. If this reform could be made an accomplished fact, the next step 

 would be to bring about a universal spelling of each of the common names, 

 so that when a trout is mentioned, every man in every State in the Union, 

 who cared to know, would understand that the word means a brook trout, 

 Salvelinus fontinalis, instead of part of the people understanding that the 

 fish referred to was a black bass, and that, when the name of the chief of 

 the pikes was written, it should be spelled mascalonge and not muskellunge 

 or something else akin to it. In England, when a pike is spoken of or 

 written about, every one in Great Britain who knows anything at all about 

 fishes recognizes the fish. In this country, when we say pike, a good share 

 of the people understand the fish to be the pike-perch. We speak of the 

 pickerel when we really mean the pike, and call the pike-perch a salmon 

 and the black bass a chub or a trout. 



Sometime ago I suggested to a well-known educator and author of 

 school text-books, who is also a sportsman, that our game and food fishes 

 should be portrayed in the school books, with a brief but plain description 

 of each fish, that all could understand and so identify the fish, and under 

 each cut should be printed one name of the fish, and not half a dozen 

 names by which the fish is known in different localities. In this way the 

 school children would be taught that each fish has but one common name, 

 whether it is found in Texas or Maine, and by a sort of evolution the 

 children of their children, ad infinitum, would come to recognize our fishes 

 at sight and call them by their proper names wherever they found them, 

 and the leaven of correct nomenclature would spread over all the land. 

 We can scarcely expect that a man who has called a pike a pickerel for 



