SMALL-MOUTHED BLACK BASS. 949 



Diagnosis. — The small-mouthed Black Bass may always be certainly 

 distinguished from the other species by the smaller scales, there being 

 70 to 80 in the lateral line. The color of the young is always a per- 

 fectly reliable distinctive mark. 



Habits. — In Ohio this species is everywhere abundant in the proper 

 localities. As compared with Micropterus salmoidet, it is a fish of the 

 running waters, having little liking for warm and grassy ponds, bayous, 

 or lakes. 



The writer can add little new to our knowledge of this most excellent 

 game fish. I, therefore, confine myself to making extracts from some of 

 the many writers who have sounded the praises of the Black Bass. 



The following article, by Dr. J. A. Henshall, first appeared in Forest 

 and Stream. 



ThoHe who have tasted the lotns of salmon oi tronb fishing in that Utopian clime of 

 far away, while reveling in its SBsthetio atmosphere, and surrounded by a misty halo of 

 the spray of the waterfall, or enveloped by the filmy gauze and irridesoent haze of the 

 cascade, have inscribed tomes, sang idyls, chanted psBons, and poured out libations in 

 honor and praise of the silver spangled salmon or the ruby studded trout, while it is left 

 to the "vulgar horde of Black Bass anglers to stand upon the mountain of their own 

 doubt and presumptioo, and, with uplifted bands, in admiration and awe, gaze with 

 dazed eyes from afar upon that forbidden land — that terra incognita, and then, having 

 lived in vain, die and leave no sign. 



It is then with a spirit of rank heresy in my heart; with smoked-glass spectacles on 

 my nose to dim the glare and glamour of the transcendent shore ; with the scales of 

 justice across my shoulder — M. ealmoides in one scoop and M. pallidus in the other — I 

 pass the barriers and confines of the enchanted laud and toss them into a stream that 

 has been depopulated of even fingerlings by the dilettanti of salmon and trout fishers ; 

 for I would not, even here, put Black Bass in a stream inhabited by salmon or brook 

 trout. While watching the plebian interlopers sporting in an eddy, their bristling 

 spines and emerald sides gleaming in the sunshine, I hear an awful voice from the ad- 

 jacent rocks exclaiming, " Fools rush in where angels fear to tread! ' Sha4e of Izaak 

 Walton defend us ! While appealing to Father Izaak for protection, I quote his words : 

 " Of which, if thou be a severe, sour complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to 

 be a competent judge." 



Seriously, most of our notions of game fish and fishing are derived from British 

 writers; and as the salmon and trout are the only fishes in Great Britain worthy of 

 being called game, they, of course, form the themes of British writers on game fish, 

 Americans, following the lead of our British cousins in this, as we were wont to do in 

 all sporting matters, have eulogized the salmon and brook trout as the game fish par 

 excellence of America, ignoring other fish equally worthy. While some claim for the 

 Striped Basa a high niche in the list of game fish, I feel free to assert that, were the 

 Black Bass a native of Great Britain, he would rank fully as high in the estimation of 

 British anglers as either the trout or the salmon. I am borne oat in this by the opinions 

 of British sportsmen, whose statements have always been received without question. 

 W. H. Herbert (Frank Forester) writing of the Black Bass, says : " This is one of the 



