COMMON AMERICAN STURGEON: OLD. 
THE STURGEONS. 
On the white sand of the bottom 
Lay the monster miche-Nahma 
Lay the sturgeon, King of Fishes. 
LoncrELLow: Hiawatha's Fishing. 
A LONG body, pentagonal from the prominence of five longitudinal rows 
of shields (one dorsal, two upper lateral, and two on the opposite 
sides of the flattish belly), running out forwards into a head with a declivous 
forehead, and a projecting snout with four barbels beneath, and behind them 
a small mouth with thickish puckered lips; such are the superficial at- 
tributes of a family of fishes confined to the northern hemisphere, but in 
that hemisphere widely distributed. Sturgeon is the universally accepted 
English name applied to all the species, and the aggregate is of family rank 
and has received the Latin name Acipenseride. 
This family is represented in the present age of the world’s history by 
several well-marked groups of generic value. The principal one of course 
is that of the true Sturgeons (4Aczpenser) which has many species in the old 
world as well as the new. 
In America five very distinct species exist, two of the Atlantic coast, one 
in the Great Lakes, and two along the Pacific slope. These five have been 
greatly subdivided, a French naturalist, A. Duméril, in 1867, having made 
as many as forty species based on slight modifications resulting from 
individual variation and changes manifest during growth. All the species 
ascend rivers for the purpose of spawning, and the species of the lake basin 
almost never, if ever, enters the sea. 
The common eastern Sturgeon (Acipenser acutirostris) is doubtfully dis- 
tinct from the European, and indeed the chief reason for separating it from 
