36 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [voL. 48 
given by the French settlers of Louisiana. Other names of still 
more limited use are silver-fish (Pensacola), and jewfish (Georgia 
and parts of Florida). Jewfish it shares with many other fishes, 
and another fish of Florida, a gigantic Serranid, is better known by 
the term. Silver-king is a euphemistic designation. Caffum is a 
name current in the island of Barbados. 
V 
The tarpon may be briefly defined as a littoral fish of warm Ameri- 
can seas often entering into rivers and acclimated in some inland 
lakes. 
The boating excursionist along some favored shore of Florida or 
Texas during the spring and summer months at least—perhaps dur- 
ing all but the winter months—may be startled by the sudden pro- 
jection from the water of a silver-like mass, which, after describing 
a low arch, will splash into the water again at a distance of maybe 
twenty feet from the starting point; that mass is the tarpon, or the 
“silver king.” Florida and Texas are the states in whose waters 
the fish is most freqently seen, because there most looked for, but 
its range extends far beyond those coasts in all directions. In 
summer wanderers visit the north as far as Massachusetts, where 
large individuals of the “ big-scale fish,” as they are there called, 
are “taken every year in traps at South Dartmouth” in the “ latter 
part of September’; southward they may be found in Brazil and 
sporadically in Argentina. Around all the islands of and in the 
Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico schools may be met with. 
Further, immigrants have found their way into rivers that enter into 
the tropical seas and the Lake of Nicaragua has long been famous 
as the home of the species. 
Being essentially a warm water fish, it is only in the warm months 
that the tarpon is to be found at its northern and southern limits. 
On the approach of cold weather it retires towards the tropics. 
Along the southern Floridian coasts some “ appear in February, in- 
creasing rapidly in numbers in March, April and May”; in Texas, 
“early in March.” At first they refuse the bait but “during the 
latter part of May and in June” bite freely. ‘ About the first of 
December ” they “ disappear entirely’ from the Texan waters. In 
the tropical seas they may be found always, and about Tampico, in 
Mexico, their “season is from November first to April, the time 
when the tarpon practically disappears from Florida and Texas.” 
The tarpon is sensitive to sudden changes of temperature and 
especially to cold, and to such changes it is sometimes subject in 
