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THE LARGE-MOUTH BASS. 
THE BLACK BASSES. 
Fishing, if I, a fisher, may protest 
Of pleasure is the sweetest, of sports the best 
Of exercises the most excellent; 
Of recreation the most innocent. 
But now the sport is marde, and wott ye why. 
Fishes decrease and fishers multiply. De Piscatione, 1598. 
T T NTIL recently, we supposed that there were many kinds of Black 
^ Basses. Different communities christened them to their own liking, 
and naturalists, misled by the numerous popular names, described, as dis¬ 
tinct, forms which, had they been seen side by side, they would have con¬ 
sidered the same. Twenty-two separately named species are on record. 
In 1873, Prof. Gill, after studying specimens gathered from all parts 
of the United States by the Smithsonian Institution, came to the decision 
that there were only two species, the Large-mouthed and the Small-mouthed 
bass. This was easy work for so accomplished an ichthyologist as Gill, 
but the difficulty was to determine the ownership of the many names 
already established in the literature of ichthyology. After five years of 
uncertainty, and several changes, thirteen of these have been allotted to 
the Small-mouth, and the remainder of nine to its cousin with the long jaw. 
The oldest name for the Large-mouth is Micropterus salmoides, and for the 
Small-mouth, as Henshall has proved, Micropterus Dolojniei: it is hoped 
that this decision, which is grounded upon a firm foundation of priority, 
may be permitted to stand unchanged. Gill’s paper, in which he defines 
the differences between the two species, was published in 1873 in the Pro¬ 
ceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 
