September 9, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



325 



is taken in the same places that sammon is. ' 

 Third, aloofe is simply the result of a 

 printer's mistaking an old-fashioned me- 

 dian s for an /. The second John Win- 

 thr.op sent to the Royal Society an article on 

 'maiz' which was published in 1679 in the 

 Philosophical Transactions (XII., p. 1066). 

 In that article he noted the coincidence of 

 the planting of corn by the Indians and 

 the ' coming up of a fish, called aloofe, into 

 the rivers. ' Of course that fish could only 

 have been the one called by his contempo- 

 raries, Morton, Wood and Josselyn, allize 

 and alewife. Fourth, alewife is doubtless 

 a mere variant— an accommodative form, 

 perhaps— of the word variously spelled in 

 olden days alose, aloose (the oo has the 

 value of a prolonged o sound), allowes, 

 allow, alice, olafle and oldwife. Fifth, the 

 Narragansett Indian name of the alewife 

 was (in the plural) aumsuog, according 

 to Roger Williams, or umpsauges, accord- 

 ing to Stiles. Sixth, the current English 

 name of one of the shads is allice or allis 

 shad. 



Let it not be inferred from this that dis- 

 respect is held towards the great New Eng- 

 lish dictionary. Even the very best are 

 liable to err, and the dictionary is not ex- 

 empt from the liability, although it does 

 rank among the 'very best' and most use- 

 ful of works ; it may be added, too, that an 

 American book to be noticed later on— 

 Smith's 'Natural History of the Fishes of 

 Massachusetts'— had some share in mis- 

 leading the learned Englishmen. Smith 

 says (p. 164) : 'It has been suggested that 

 alewife is derived from the Indian word 

 aloof — signifying a bony fish.' 



Naturally, the Indians had names for all 

 fishes of economical value, and even for 

 others. A few only, however, were adopted 

 by the new colonists, and those only in 

 forms considerably different from the orig- 

 inals. Such are, besides menhaden, scup, 

 chogset, tautog and squeteague, still more 



or less used along the Atlantic coast, 

 namaycush, masamacush, winninish (ouan- 

 aniche), togue, siscowet and cisco in the 

 interior, and stit-tse, nissnee, quinnat, 

 kisutch and eulachon or oolachan along the 

 Pacific coast. 



II. 



The first special memoir of a really scien- 

 tific nature on the fishes of our region was 

 communicated in 1794 by William Dand- 

 ridge Peck, btit not published till 1804 in 

 the Memoirs of the American Academy of 

 Arts and Sciences. Peck was then resident 

 at Kittery, N. H., and his memoir was en- 

 titled ' Description of Four Remarkable 

 Fishes, taken near the Piscataqua in New 

 Hampshire. ' He aptly prefaces his article 

 with the remark that ' that part of the 

 Atlantic which washes the extensive sea 

 coast of Massachusetts, affords a consider- 

 able number of fishes, many of which are 

 but little known ' and, after some further 

 remarks, proceeds to describe the species. 



William Dandridge Peck was born in 

 Boston, Mass., May 8, 1763, graduated at 

 Harvard in 1782, and subsequently served 

 for some years ' in a counting house in Bos- 

 ton. ' "He was an ingenious mechanic, and 

 made a microscope and many other delicate 

 instruments." At the same time he was 

 a devoted student of natural history and 

 especially of ichthyology. His studies were 

 crowned in 1805 by the reward of a pro- 

 fessorship of natural history in Harvard 

 College and this was held till his death. 

 He died October 3, 1822. 



Let us now return to his memoir. As 

 already noted, the species were four. The 

 first was identified by him with the Ophi- 

 dium imierie of Linnseus; the second re- 

 ceived a new name, Stromateus triacanthus; 

 the third also has a new name, Blennius 

 anguillaris, and the fourth was considered 

 to be specifically identical with the Cy- 

 prinus catostomus of Forster. Peek's de- 

 scriptions were very good— for the time at 



