284 



With Rod and Gun in New England 



fifty years of his life, will commence in his fifty-first year to call it by its 

 proper name, and we will, in order to succeed in this reform and make it 

 permanent, have to begin with the children and educate them by aid of 

 text-books, at the same time that they learn the multiplication table, to 

 call a pike-perch a pike-perch, and not a dore or a salmon. My friend, 

 the professor, was of the opinion that the idea was an excellent one, and 

 and in fact he has already incorporated into one of the school books a 

 condensed statement regarding the breeding season of our game birds, to 

 educate the children when and why they should be protected from harm. 

 Even our statutes perpetuate the misapplication of the names of our fishes. 

 Salmon trout are provided with a close season in one of our States, and 

 there are regulations concerning the catching and possessing of a fish of 

 that name, when there is not a single salmon trout in any water in the State. 

 Of course the fish the statute intends to protect is the lake trout, but it 

 has been, by some, called salmon trout and the law confirms the error. 

 We have a salmon trout on the Pacific coast, better known, perhaps, as the 

 steel-head. Great Britain has a salmon trout also, but neither that nor 

 the steel-head is the lake trout of New England, New York and the Great 

 lakes. 



Very recently, to my surprise, I heard a witness in the Supreme 

 Court in New York State, testify that the fish which is properly the pike, 

 Lucius luciuSy was a mascalonge. The man was perfectly honest, as I 

 found when I made a visit to the waters from which the fish were taken, 

 for I learned from the residents about the lake in question that the fish were 

 called "mascalonge" or " pickerel," as though they were interchangeable 

 terms. The idea seemed to be, as near as I could get at the facts from my 

 private investigation and from the testimony in court, that the fish was a 

 pickerel up to a certain size, and when it grew beyond that size it was a 

 mascalonge. 



The three members of the pike 

 family best known to anglers, the 

 mascalonge, the pike and the pick- 

 erel, are easily separated, one from 

 another, by the formation of the scales 

 on the cheeks and gill covers. The 

 mascalonge has scales on the upper 

 portion of both cheeks and gill covers, 

 about eight rows of scales, and below 



these scales, cheeks and gill covers 

 Part of Cheek and Gill Covers of a Mascalonge. afe bare Thb mark j s constant< The 



mascalonge may come from the St. Lawrence river and have round brown 

 spots on a light ground ; from the Ottawa river or Wisconsin, and have 

 no spots at all ; or from Chatauqua lake in New York, and have irregular 



