Untitled - RB-Flys

4
PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH.
size of the gape, very similar to the corresponding bones in the
viper conformation.
We have, however, in the British Islands and on the Continent,
only '
'
one recognised species which ;
species, according
to the author of '
British Fishes '
and some other writers, has
probably been 'acclimatised.' Personally I am rather disposed
to believe it to be indigenous ; but I willingly leave the point
to the researches of the curious in such matters, and to the
students, if such there be, of mediaeval ichthyology. If the
fish was really an importation, it could not, at any rate, have
been a very recent one, as pike
are mentioned in the Act of
the 6th year of Richard II., 1382, and also by Chaucer in the
well-known lines :
Full many a fair partrich hadde he in mewe,
And many a breme, and many a Luce in stewe. . . ,
One of the names by which the pike was formerly known,
now obsolete, or at any rate used only as a diminutive, is
'
pickerel;' which again, when arrived at a certain, or rather un-
certain age of discretion, becomes a 'jack;' to be finally inducted
into the full dignity of pikehood. The term 'pike' has been
supposed to take its origin in the Saxon word piik, sharp-
pointed, in reference to the peculiar form of the pike's head,
thus, by the way, furnishing an argument in favour of the
indigenous character of the fish, in contradiction to Yarrell's
'
theory. Skinner and Tooke would derive it from
importation '
the French word/f?ztt, on account, they say, of the sharpness
of its snout. It is the brocJiet or brocheton, lance or lanceron,
and becquet of France, the gtidda of the Swede, and the gcdde
or gei of Denmark, which latter term is nearly identical with
the lowland Scotch gedd. Ingenious derivations of all these
names have been discovered by philologists, but they arc,
for the most part, somewhat fanciful. The luccio or luzzo of
the Italians, and the term luce or lucie ('white lucic '
of Shake-
speare and of heraldry) are evidently derived from the old
classical name of the fish, Indus. Here again, however, we