REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF FISHERIES. 167 
- England were not very far astray in many of the names they gave; 
but as they or their successors wandered farther and farther from 
their old home, they made many mistakes. A few examples out of 
the very many will illustrate. 
Among the most common of the English fishes are the cod, perch, 
bass, and trout. The immigrants to Massachusetts applied these names 
to fishes of the same genera as the originals, or of very closely related 
genera, but mostly of different species. As population extended into 
remoter regions and stranger faunas, the meager supply of names had 
to be doled out to forms quite unlike those to which they had been 
originally applied. 
od was at first scarcely at all misapplied, the species being so well 
known to all, but in a few cases the name was given to the only fresh- 
water species of the same family—Lota maculosa, otherwise called, 
burbot; when the Americans reached the Pacific coast, however, not 
finding the true cod, they misapplied its name to fishes of very differ- 
ent families, although generally with qualifying prefixes. Thus, the 
young of the boccaccio (a scorpenoid fish, Scbastodes paucispinis), 
which were caught at the wharves of San Francisco, were dubbed tom- 
cods; a hexagrammoid fish (/feragramiius decagrammus), also inaptly 
named spotted rock trout, was by others called rock cod; another spe- 
cies (Ophiodon elongatus) was designated as the cod or ‘‘ codfish where 
the true cod is unknown,” and, where it is known, the cultus cod. 
Perch was subject to much greater misuse. In England the name is 
specifically applied to a well-known fresh-water fish (Perca fluviatilis). 
The immigrants to New England found a fish almost undistinguishable 
from it, and properly gave it the same name. Others gave it to fishes 
having no real resemblance; such is the one called also white perch 
along the Atlantic coast, which is a bass (Morone americana); others 
are sclenids, as the silver perch (Lazrdiella chrysura), the gray perch 
(Pogonias chromzs), and the white perch of the Ohio River (Aplodinotus 
grunniens); another, the red perch (Sebastes marinus), is a scorpenid; 
and still another, the blue perch (7autogolabrus burgall), a wrasse or 
labrid. The name is also given in some places to various species of a 
family peculiar to America, the centrarchids, and among them to the 
black-basses and the sun-fishes. Along the Pacific coast it is given to 
viviparous fishes or embiotocids; especially, in California, to the 
alfione (2?hachochilus toxotes), and in Oregon and Washington to 
another, likewise miscalled porgee (Damalichthys argyrosomus). The 
Sacramento River embiotocid (//ysterocarpus traskii) is called river 
perch, or simply perch. 
Bass is applied to so many different species—a score or more—that 
we can not spare the room to enumerate them. In England it is the 
proper name of a marine fish common only along the southern coast, 
formerly called Labrax lupus, but now named Dicentrarchus labrax. 
