Garfish
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Garfish. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
SEAPIKE, or GARPIKE (Belone vulgaris), a fish, known also as the sea needle, making its appearance a short time before the mackerel in their annual visit for spawning. It is long and slender, sometimes 2 or 3 feet in length. The name garfish, or garpike, is also given to other species of Belone, and to a ganoid fish of the genus Lepidosteus, found in the fresh waters of America. GARGANO (gär-gänō) (ancient Garganus), a mountainous peninsula, the "spur" of Italy, in the province of Foggia, jutting out about 30 miles into the Adriatic Sea, and attaining in Monte Calvo a height of 3,460 feet. Bee-keeping is yet as generally engaged in as in the time of Horace. The district is visited mainly by pilgrims to a shrine of St. Michael on Monte St. Angelo. (gär'ga-rä) (Turkish GARGARA Kasdagh), the highest mountain of the ridge of Ida, in Asia Minor, near the Gulf of Adramyti, on the N.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
or Garpike, an American fish reminding one somewhat of a sturgeon. Both jaws are prolonged into a long snout, fifteen to twenty times its least width. The upper lobe of the tail is prolonged. There are three or four species. The common garpike, as it is called, is about three feet long. It is olivaceous in color, marked above with round black spots. It is found in the Great Lakes and large streams from New Jersey to Mexico. The short-nosed gar, three feet long, is found in the Mississippi River, and the alligator gar, six feet long, is found from Illinois to Cuba. The gar is covered with bony plates rivaling those of the alligator. The hide is thick. If dried it becomes as hard and as stiff as a tin can.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's 1921 name Belone vulgaris for the European sea-needle is now Belone belone, and the American gars' genus Lepidosteus is spelled Lepisosteus, with the alligator gar moved to Atractosteus spatula — a fish that Aiton's put at six feet but which is now documented at over eight feet and upwards of 300 pounds, the largest wholly freshwater fish of North America. The two families are no longer thought closely related at all: the slender saltwater garfish is a modern teleost, while the gars are the last survivors of an ancient lineage whose enamel-covered ganoid scales Aiton's rightly compared to alligator hide. Long dismissed as worthless "trash fish" and destroyed on sight, gars are now managed as game fish with size limits, and the alligator gar is the subject of restocking programmes in parts of the Mississippi basin from which it had vanished. The spotted gar's genome was sequenced in 2016 and is used as a reference point for comparing bony fishes with land vertebrates.
Written for this edition, 2026.