2 
BULLETIN OE THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 
on various parts of the French coast. The name sardine has reference to the island 
of Sardinia, in the Mediterranean, about whose shores the fish is abundant. 
As early as 1553, Pierre Belon, a French naturalist, asserted that the sardine is 
the young of the pilchard; and at present this is the view of nearly all authorities. 
The pilchard, as is well known, is one of the most important fishes of the southern coast 
of England, being especially abundant in Cornwall. Young pilchards or “sardines” 
are found on the Cornish coast, but are apparently not so numerous as in France and 
are in little demand, as canning is very limited in extent; on the other hand large 
sardines or pilchards are caught on the French coast, but are much less abundant and 
less important than the small fish. 
In allusion to the small sardine being caught almost wholly by means of bait 
consisting of fish roe {rogue), the French call it sardine de 'rogue, in contradistinction 
to the large fish which is taken without bait by means of drift nets, and hence called 
sardine de derive. Modern French writers on the sardine fishery seem averse to 
acknowledging the specific identity of the sardine and the pilchard; some even fail 
to explain or suggest the relation between the large and small fishes of the west coast 
of France, but Messrs. Fabre-Domergue and Bietrix, of the French department of 
fisheries, in a paper 1 on the reproduction of the oceanic sardine, state that they con- 
sider the sardine de derive as the adult individual of the species, which toward spring- 
lays pelagic eggs in local waters; the sardine de rogue , on the contrary, is the young- 
form, whose age, according to their reasonably exact computations, does not exceed 
two years. 
This fish has been referred to by most American and European systematic 
writers under the name Glupea pilchardus Linmeus. Cuvier, in 1829, described the 
small fish under the name C lupea sardina , which designation is still retained by some 
writers. In 1803 Lacepede separated the pilchard with several other species from the 
genus Glupea, because of supposed peculiarities of dentition, and referred it to a new 
genus, Glupanodon , which has been revived in a recent American work 2 and made 
to include the West India sardine, C. pseitdohispanieits (Poey), and the California sar- 
dine, C. eceruleus (Girard). Modern European writers on the pilchard (Cunningham, 
McIntosh, and others) apparently have seen no necessity for taking it out of the 
genus Clupea . 
1 Proceedings of the International Congress of Maritime Fisheries, Sables-d’Olonne, 1896. 
2 The Fishes of North and Middle America, by Jordan & Evermann. Part 1, 1896. 
