REPRINT OF ORIGINAL TEXT 45 



Mr. Lesueur was the first naturalist who visited Lake 

 Erie and Lake Ontario, where he detected a great 

 number of new species, which he has already begun 

 to publish in the Journal of the Academy of Sciences 

 of Philadelphia, and which he means to introduce in 

 his General History of American Fishes, a work on 

 the plan of Wilson's Ornithology, which he has long 

 had in contemplation. And I have added thereto 

 about forty new species, which I discovered in Lake 

 Champlain, Lake George, the Chesapeake, the Hud- 

 son, near New- York, Philadelphia, the Atlantic, &c. 

 and published in my Precis des Decouvertes, my Mem- 

 oirs on Sturgeons, my decads and tracts in the 

 American Monthly Magazine, the American Journal 

 of Science, &c. besides three new fishes of the Ohio, 

 published in the Journal of the Academy of Phila- 

 delphia. 



Many other fishes of the United States have been 

 partially [I. 307] [7] described by Bartram, Carver, 

 Lewis and Clarke and other travellers. It is reason- 

 able to suppose that several others have escaped their 

 notice, and my discoveries in the Ohio prove this 

 assertion. I calculate that we know at present about 

 five hundred species of North American fishes, while 

 ten years ago we hardly knew one hundred and 

 twenty. Among that number about one half are fresh 

 water fishes, and one fourth at least belong to the 

 waters of the western states; but, although there are 

 fifty other species imperfectly known, I should not 

 wander far from reality if I should conjecture that, 

 after all, we merely know one third of the real num- 

 bers, when we consider that the whole of the Mexi- 

 can Provinces is a blank in Ichthyology, as well as 

 California, the North West Coast, the Northern 



