PREFACE. 
In compliance with an invitation from the Boston Society of Natural History, the present 
writer undertook the task of monographing the fishes of New England. The author agreed 
with the Society that it was best to issue the monograph in the form of parts, each comprising a 
small group of the fishes, as for instance, one family, or the species composing one or more 
genera. The New England trouts or chairs, coming nearest to meeting the requirements of 
time, convenience, and opportunity, were selected as the subject of Part 1. Of the freshwater 
species, these are the forms for which New England is most famous. 
The natural fish fauna of New England is not rich in species compared with that of some 
other parts of the United States, but it does not conform to Agassiz's interpretation of it, except 
in the absence of some forms. Agassiz VTOte: * “In this isolated region of North America, in 
this zoological island of New England, as we may well call it, we find neither Lepidosteus, nor 
Amia, nor Polyodon, nor Amblodon, nor Grystes, nor Centrarchus, nor Pomoxis, nor Amblo- 
plites, nor Calliurus, nor Carpiodes, nor Hyodon, nor indeed any of the characteristic forms of 
North American freshwater fishes so common everywhere else, with the exception of two 
Pomotis, one Boleosoma and a few Catostomus.” 
New England is not isolated even in its fauna but it lies on the outskirts of the faunas of 
some other States of the union. Since the days of Agassiz, through discovery, many more species 
have been added to the fist, and of those mentioned as so common to the rest of North America, 
some are of more restricted geographical distribution than most of the species composing the 
New England fish fauna. Polyodon, for instance, is found only in the Mississippi Valley. 
One of the New England charrs (Salvelinus namaycush) occurs through the Great Lakes to 
Montana, British Columbia, and Alaska, and north to the Arctic Ocean. Agassiz did not name 
those that were common to New England and to some of the other States, as well as Canada, 
or those so common in New England and Canada and so scarce in the center of abundance of 
the genera enumerated by him. The fauna, especially of the fresh waters, is in every way much 
like that of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Quebec south of the St. Lawrence River, and to 
some extent similar to almost all of eastern Canada extending to Hudson Bay. In fact, with New 
Brunswick and Nova Scotia, it is practically a southern extension of eastern Canadian fauna. 
Particularly in the northern parts of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, it partakes of the 
character of the fauna of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. There is a well marked 
dividing line in the Green Mountains of Vermont which excludes some of the Great Lakes 
' Agassiz, L. Amer. Journ. Sci. and Arts, ser. 2, vol. 17, p. 364, 1854. 
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