Distinctive Features. 51 



Among them is the careless habit of many correspondents 

 of our sportsmen's jpurnals, who write of bass, bass tackle, 

 bass fishing, etc., meaning black bass in each instance, but 

 leave it to the imagination of the readers of those journals 

 as to what particular kind of " bass " is meant. 



Now this is all wrong, and is owing to carelessness, or 

 perhaps in some instances to a want of proper information, 

 and is a habit that ought to be reformed. We should learn 

 to call things by their right names. A rose by any other 

 name may smell as sweet, but as there are many varieties 

 of roses they must be distinguished by correct and specific 

 names, and not by their odors. It is just as easy to write 

 the distinctive name "black bass" as the general name 

 " bass." 



Bass is a very vague term at best, meaning one thing in 

 one part of the country, and a totally different thing in an- 

 other. Along the eastern coast it means a striped bass 

 (Roccus lineaius), or a sea bass (Centropristes striatus) ; 

 in Florida it means a channel bass (Scicenops ocellatus) ; 

 in the west it may be either a black bass (Micropterus) , a 

 rock bass (Amhloplites rupestris), a white bass {Roccus 

 chrysops), or a calico bass (Pomoxys sparoides) ; while in 

 Otsego County, Hew York, it means an Otsego bass (Core- 

 gonus clupeiformis var. otsego), which is not a bass at all 

 but a whitefish. 



Then, again, some of these correspondents write of the 

 real black bass, meaning usually the small-mouth species, 

 seeming to imply that the other species is not real, or at 

 least is not the black bass, but something else — a kind of 

 pseudo variety. Others in writing of the large-mouth spe- 

 cies, owing to its former name, M. nigricans, have called it 

 the real black bass, under the impression that as it was 

 named nigricans — i. e., black — the other species must be 



