34 Fisuineg in AmeRtIcAN WATERS. 
The large tongue in the carp may have been providentially 
furnished to give it a more acute taste for preventing it from 
being poisoned by eating water hemlock, or other deleterious 
plants, as it is known to feed on water-plants. That all fish 
are not thus provided with taste sufficiently acute to enable 
them to reject what is poisonous, appears from the practice 
of poachers in poisoning*fish by pulverizing and making a 
paste of fisher’s berries, or Cocculus indicus, which they form 
into balls about the size of peas and east into the water. 
Fish greedily swallow these, and, becoming intoxicated or 
palsied thereby, float to the surface of the water and are eas- 
ily caught, or soon die. Chub and dace are ready victims 
to this device, as are also the black bass, Oswego, yellow, 
white, rock, and all the varieties of lake and river bass. It 
is always dangerous to purchase fish out of season any 
where; but residents of cities should be especially careful 
who they purchase from, and the safest houses are those which 
deal largely with fishing firms of established reputation. 
Teeth of fishes appear destined more especially for laying 
hold and detaining their prey than for chewing. With this 
view they are bent inward, like tenter-hooks, so that. fishes, 
howsoever small and slippery, are forced back into the gul- 
let, and their escape or return prevented. It is no doubt 
with the same design that the throats of many fish are stud- 
ded with what M. Bory St. Vincent terms a pavement of 
teeth. Such fishes as have teeth thus placed far back on the 
palate and upper part of the throat, while in their jaws they 
have none, are termed by anglers “leather-mouthed,” but 
technically malacostomata. 
Anglers of the British Isles reckon among the principal of 
leather-mouthed fishes the minnow, gudgeon, roach, loach, 
bleak, chub, daces, barbel, bream, rud, tench, carp, and other 
minor fishes. The salmon and the pike have teeth in the 
jaws and in all parts of the mouth, and the perch in all parts 
of the mouth except the tongue. The sturgeon and sucker, 
again, have no teeth whatever. 
