XXXil AMERICAN FISHES. 
it not pretty sport,” says he, “to pvll vp two pence, six pence, and twelue 
pence, as fast as you can hale & veare a line? He is a very bad fisher, 
cannot kill in one day with his hooke & line, one, two, or three hundred 
cods: which dressed & dryed, if they be sould there for ten shillings the 
hundred, though in England they will giue more than twentie; may not 
both the seruant, the master, & marchant, be well content with this 
gaine?” 
Another of the new-comers, “a reverend Divine ”-(Francis Higginson), 
wrote, in 1630, “The aboundance of Sea-Fish are [zs] almost beyond 
beleeuing, & sure I should scarce haue beleeued it except I had seene it 
with mine owne Eyes.” 
To these numerous fishes the immigrants transferred names of English 
species with which they were more or less familiar. On account of the 
greater number of species, or at least of genera, common to the two coun- 
tries, the emigrants from Old England to New England were not very far 
astray in naming many of the fishes of their new home; but as they, or 
their successors, wandered farther and farther from their old home, they 
made many mistakes. A few examples of the very many will illustrate. 
Among the most common of the English fishes are the Cod, Perch, Bass, 
and Trout. The immigrants into Massachusetts applied these names to 
fishes of the same genera as the originals, or to very closely related genera, 
but mostly of different species. As population extended into remoter regions 
and stranger faunas, thé meagre supply of names had to be doled out to 
forms quite unlike those to which they had been originally applied. 
Cod was used in a few cases for the only fresh-water species of the same 
family — Lota maculosa, otherwise called Burbot; but when the Ameri- 
cans reached the Pacific coast, not finding the true Cod, they misapplied its 
name to fishes of very different families, although generally with qualifying 
prefixes. Thus, the young of the Boccaccio (a Scorpzenoid fish, Sedastodes 
paucispinis), which were caught at the wharves of San Francisco, were 
dubbed Tom-Cods; a Hexagrammoid fish (Hexagrammus decagrammus), 
also inaptly named Spotted Rock Trout, was by others called Rock 
Cod; another species (Ophiodon elongatus) was designated as the Cod or 
“Codfish where the true Cod is unknown,” and, where it is known, the 
Cultus Cod. 
Perch was subject to much greater misuse. In England the name is 
specifically applied to a well-known fresh-water fish (Perca fluviatilis). The 
immigrants into New England found a fish almost undistinguishable from 
