the decorative art of Lynch doth ever remind me the noble Indian warrior
in his plumes and paint. Unfitted, by the circumscribed character of
their sea-craft, their tackle, and their skill, for pushing their
enterprise out into the deeper water, where the shark might haply say to
the horse-mackerel,--"Come, old horse, let you and me hook ourselves on,
and take these foolish tawny fellows and their brown cockle-shell down
into the under-tow,"--they supplied their primitive wants by enticing
from the shallows the beautiful, sunny-scaled shoal-fish, well named by
ichthyologists _Argyrops_, the "silver-eyed." But the poor Indian,
who knew no Greek,--poor old savage, lament for him with a scholarly
_eheu!_--called this shiner of the sea, in his own barbarous lingo,
_Scuppaug_. Can any master of Indian dialects tell us whether that word,
too, means "him of the silver eye"? If it does, revoke, O student, your
shrill _eheu_ for the Greekless and untrousered savage of the canoe,
suppress your feelings, and go steadily into rhabdomancy with several
divining-rods, in search of the Pierian spring which must surely exist
somewhere among the guttural districts of the Ojibbeway tongue.

And here there is diversion for philologist as well as fisherman; for
while the latter is catching the fish, the former may seize on the fact,
that in this word, _Scuppaug_, is to be found the origin of the two
separate names by which Argyrops, the silver-eyed, is miscalled in local
vernacular. True to the national proclivity for clipping names, the
fishermen of Rhode Island appeal to him by the first syllable only of
his Indian one,--for in the waters thereabout he is talked of by the
familiar abbreviation, _Scup._ But to the excursionists and fishermen of
New York he is known only as _Porgy,_ or _Paugie_, a form as obviously
derived from the last syllable of his Indian name as the emphatic
"siree" of our greatest orators is from the modest monosyllable "sir."
_Porgy_ seems to be the accepted form of the word; but letters of the