SMALL-MOUTHED BLACK BASS. 949 
Diagnosis—The small-mouthed Black Bass may always be certainly 
distinguished from the other species by the smaller scales, there being 
70 to 80 in the lateral line. The color of the young is always a per- 
fectly reliable distinctive mark. 
Habits.—In Ohio this species is everywhere abundant in the proper 
localities. As compared with JMicropterus salmoides, it is a fish of the 
running waters, having little liking for warm and grassy ponds, bayous, 
or lakes. 
The writer can add little new to our knowledge of this most excellent 
game fish. I, therefore, confine myself to making extracts from some of 
the many writers who have sounded the praises of the Black Bass. 
The following article, by Dr. J. A. Henshall, first appeared in Forest 
and Stream. | 
Those who have tasted the lotus of salmon or trout fishing in that Utopian clime of 
far away, while reveling in its esthetic atmosphere, and surrounded by a misty halo of 
the spray of the waterfall, or enveloped by the filmy gauze and irridescent haze of the 
cascade, have inscribed tomes, sang idyls, chanted pons, and poured out libations in 
honor and praise of the silver spangled salmon or the ruby studded trout, while it is left 
to the vulgar horde of Black Bass anglers to stand upon the mountain of their own 
_ doubt and presumption, and, with uplifted hands, in admiration and awe, gaze with 
dazed eyes from afar upon that forbidden land—that terra incognita, and then, having 
lived in vain, die and leave no sign. 
It is then with a spirit of rank heresy in my heart; with smoked-glass spectacles on 
my nose to dim the glare and glamour of the transcendent shore; with the scales of 
justice across my shoulder—W. salmoides in one scoop and UW. pallidus in the other—I 
pass the barriers and confines of the enchanted land and toss them into a stream that 
has been depopulated of even fingerlings by the dilettanti of salmon and trout fishers; 
for I would not, even here, put Black Bass in a stream inhabited by salmon or brook © 
trout. While watching the plebian interlopers sporting in an eddy, their bristling 
spines and emerald sides gleaming in the sunshine, I hear an awful voice from the ad- 
jacent rocks exclaiming, ‘‘ Fools rush in where angels fear to tread!” Shade of Izaak 
Walton defend us! While appealing to Father Izaak for protection, I quote his words: 
‘Of which, if thou be a severe, sour complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to 
be a competent judge.” . 
Seriously, most of our notions of game fish and fishing are derived from British 
writers; and as the salmon and trout are the only fishes in Great Britain worthy of 
being called game, they, of course, form the themes of British writers on game fish, 
Americans, following the lead of our British cousins in this, as we were wont to do in 
all sporting matters, have eulogized the salmon and brook trout as the game fish par 
excellence of America, ignoring other fish equally worthy. While some claim for the 
Striped Bass a high niche in the list of game fish, I feel free to assert that, were the 
Black Bass a native of Great Britain, he would rank fully as high in the estimation of 
_ British anglers as either the trout or the salmon. I am borne out in this by the opinions 
of British sportsmen, whose statements have always been received without question. 
W. H. Herbert (Frank Forester) writing of the Black Bass, says: ‘‘ This is one of the 
