FISHERIES, GAME AND FORESTS. 147 



would perhaps better serve to test the possibility of adding weight to its near 

 Canadian relative, while the extremely low temperature and turbulent nature of the 

 water this latter inhabits would prevent the issues of such union from losing the 

 gameness that arises from its habit of surface feeding the whole season through. On 

 the other hand 1 have some doubt as to whether the Canadian ouananiche itself, 

 transplanted into New York waters, might not be influenced by different climatic 

 conditions and the higher temperature of the waters in a new habitat, to become largely 

 a bottom feeder like its American congener, excepting in the spring of the year. 



In regard to external appearance, Mr. Walter Brackett, of Boston, has contributed 

 to the forthcoming work on the subject a description of the slight differences, as they 

 appear to the well-trained eye of an experienced fish artist, between a grilse and a 

 ouananiche. These are evidently but local adaptations, as the anatomy of the two fish 

 is identical. The title "land-locked," applied to the Canadian ouananiche. is a 

 misnomer. I am sorry to find it in so respectable an authority as Webster's 

 Dictionary, which is equally erroneous in discarding the original form of the fish's 

 name, reduced to writing 250 years ago from its Indian pronunciation, and substitut- 

 ing therefore "winninish," which is not even a good phonetic English spelling of the 

 spoken Indian word. The absurd attempts of vandal linguists to get away from the 

 original form of the name has resulted in the use of some twenty to thirty varying 

 orthographies, which I collected some time ago in a paper on the philology of the 

 ouananiche read before the Royal Society of Canada, and reproduced in great part in 

 "The Book of the Ouananiche." 



That the fish is not land-locked is quite evident to. all acquainted with its habitat. 

 In the Lake St. John waters, in particular, it has unobstructed access to the sea. The 

 familiar story of the Lake St. John ouananiche, imprisoned above an impassable 

 barrier in the bed of the Saguefiay is simply a common error. Some writers have 

 jumped at the conclusion that " at some past period of their piscatorial destiny, a 

 colony of salmon from the sea, well satisfied with the depth of the waters and the 

 abundance of food in the Saguenay, concluded to secede from their oceanic domain, 

 and remaining in their congenial environment founded a kingdom of their own." But 

 even this pretty theory has to be abandoned when investigating the case of ouananiche 

 in the inland waters of Labrador, sometimes found above falls of a hundred or more 

 feet in height. 



Up to within the last year or two it has been quite a common practice to speak of 

 the ouananiche as peculiar to Lake St. John and its tributary waters. Recent explora- 

 tions, such as that of A. P. Low, of the Dominion Geological Survey of 1894-95, 

 through the interior of Labrador, have brought to light the fact that the fish is found 

 in most of the large streams draining the interior of the great Labrador peninsula and 



