Shad
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Shad. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an excellent table fish of the hering type. It is a sea fish from twenty-four to thirty inches long, and weighs from three to four pounds. There are four species. Two are found on the Atlantic coast of Europe, one in the waters of the Gulf, and the fourth, the common American shad, is a native of the North American coast waters from Florida to Newfoundland. The last named ascends our Atlantic rivers in early spring to spawn. Shad are taken with nets or by casting. They are marketed extensively, fresh. The fishermen put them down also with salt in barrels for winter sale. The alewife, a smaller fish of similar appearance and formerly supposed to be a young shad, is taken likewise with nets and salted down for commercial purposes. Both are bony. The flesh of the shad ranks next to that of the trout in excellence. In point of commercial value to the American fisherman, the shad is surpassed by the salmon and the cod only. In the year of our last census, 49,780,530 pounds of shad were taken, worth $1,519,946. The shad is prolific. A single fish produces as high as 150,000 eggs in a season. In 1871 the California State Fish Commission employed Mr. Seth Green of Rochester to place 10,000 young shad in the Sacramento River. The United States Fish Commission followed up the experiment with 60,000 more, and, in 1885-6, 910,000 shad fry were placed in the Willamette and Columbia rivers. As a result shad now range from southern California to Alaska and supply the cities of the Pacific coast with a million pounds of meat annually. The shad bush, a small bush with fruit of the crabapple order, is so called because it blooms when the shad are running. Its blossoms in May or June are the welcomed signal for shad fishing. See Herring
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the popular name of three anadromous fishes of the genus Clupea: (1) The allice or European shad. (2) The American shad, C. sapidissima, an important food fish, abundant on the At- SHAD the American rivers. It spawns in fresh water. Great quantities are salted. (3) The Twaite shad, C. finta, from 12 to 16 inches long, with 21-27 stout osseous gillrakers on the horizontal part of the outer branchial arch. Common on the coasts of Europe, ascending rivers; abundant in the Nile. The flesh is coarser than that of the allice shad.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The two biggest shifts are the name and the numbers. The shad is no longer placed in Clupea with the herrings, as Collier's had it in 1921, but in the genus Alosa, as Alosa sapidissima; Aiton's 1910 boast of nearly 50 million pounds landed in a census year now reads as a high-water mark, since dams, pollution and overfishing cut Atlantic runs to a fraction of that, and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission closed the ocean-intercept fishery in 2005, with several states banning shad fishing outright. Aiton's account of the 1871 planting in the Sacramento and the 1885-6 fry in the Columbia and Willamette proved more successful than anyone intended: shad are now so numerous in the Columbia that millions are counted passing Bonneville Dam in a good year, far outnumbering the salmon, and they are treated as an unwanted introduction rather than a triumph. The shadbush still blooms when the fish run, and dam removals such as the Kennebec's Edwards Dam in 1999 have been aimed at bringing the eastern runs back.
Written for this edition, 2026.