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Updated: May 23, 2025
Hearne writes of Lake Athabasca that it swarms with fish, such as pike, trout, perch, barbel, and other kinds not easily identified. The size of these gar-pike range from two feet to four feet in length. Their flesh was delicately white and soft, but so foul and rank in taste that even the Indians would not eat it.
Looked at from this point of view, the animal world is an intellectual Creation, complete in all its parts, and coherent throughout; and when we find, that, although these ancient types have become obsolete and been replaced by modern ones, yet there are always a few old-fashioned individuals, left behind, as it were, to give the key to the history of their race, as the Gar-Pike, for instance, to explain the ancient Fishes, the Millepore to explain the old Acalephian Corals, the Nautilus to be the modern exponent of the Ammonites and Orthoceratites of past times, we cannot avoid the impression that this Creative work has been intended also to be educational for Man, and to teach him his own relation to the organic world.
Lepidotus Mantelli, Agassiz. Wealden. a. Palate and teeth. b. Side view of teeth. c. The fishes of the Wealden are chiefly referable to the Ganoid and Placoid orders. These ganoids were allied to the Lepidosteus, or Gar-pike, of the American rivers. The whole body was covered with large rhomboidal scales, very thick, and having the exposed part coated with enamel.
Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body.
From this type he had learned more perhaps than from any other, of the relations between the past and the present fishes. When a student of nineteen years of age, his first sight of a stuffed skin of a gar-pike in the Museum of Carlsruhe told him that it stood alone among living fishes.
The head has a snout two feet and a half long, and the jaws possess double rows of sharp and dangerous teeth. These teeth were used by the natives as lancets with which to bleed themselves when they suffered from inflammation or headache. Champlain declares that the gar-pike often captures and eats water birds.
Then, the time of the first fishes came, and the other animals looked on them in awe and wonder as the Indians eyed Columbus. They were like the gar-pike in our Western rivers, only much larger, as big as a stove-pipe, and with a crust as hard as a turtle's shell. Then there came sharks, of strange forms, savage and ferocious, with teeth like bowie-knives.
To his great delight, when the first living specimen of the gar-pike, or modern Lepidosteus, was brought to him, it moved its head to the right and left and upward, as a Saurian does and as no other fish can. The result of this expedition was a valuable collection of fishes and a report upon the fauna and the geology of Lake Superior, comprising the erratic phenomena.
To believe that our remote ancestor, no matter how remote in time or space, was a lowly organized creature living in the primordial seas with no more brains than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts our scientific faith to severe test. Think of it.
Not only for its own novelty and variety, but for its bearing on the geographical distribution of animals, the fauna of this great sheet of fresh water interested him deeply. On this journey he saw at Niagara for the first time a living gar-pike, the only representative among modern fishes of the fossil type of Lepidosteus.
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