Although to know them may have been to understand their worth, I find one early writer, Marshall McDonald Douglass, in his _North America_, 1740, who does not give the tribe much credit. “Alewives,” he says, “by some of the country people are called Herrings. They are of the Herring tribe but much larger than the true Herring. They are a very mean, dry and insipid fish. Some of them are cured in the manner of white Herrings and sent to the sugar islands for the slaves, but because of their bad quality they are not in request: in some places they are used to manure the land. They are very plenty, and come up the rivers and brooks into ponds in the spring.” None the less, they used to be smoked or pickled in brine and shipped out in barrels to the West Indies, and whether or not the quality was bad the demand was enough to make the trade in them into one of great volume, part in fact of the famous swap for molasses, later turned into New England rum, which was so important in our early history. Before I try to defend these fish against any further imputations, I should explain their name. “Herrin’” is the name and pronunciation on Cape Cod. I don’t call them alewives just to defy such Cape Codders as might be fussy about it, but to differentiate them from their more famous cousins the sea herring, which spawn in salt water. Cape Cod has its alewives committees, and it may be that the fish were called alewives here before they were called herrin’. You can still read statements to the effect that the original name “alewife” is a corruption of the Indian word “aloofe,” which meant bony fish. In 1871 a gentleman named J. Hammond Trumbull tried to scotch this bit of etymology by pointing out--in a government publication on Sea Fisheries, that the Narragansett and Massachusetts Indians called the alewife and herring “Aumsu-og,” as had been noted by Roger Williams. In any case, whichever Indianism we choose, it seems more likely that the name stemmed from English dialect. “Allizes,” not at all like aloofe, was one of the names applied to it in company with the allice shad. To quote Mr. Trumbull again: “The modern English ‘allis’ was in old French and old English ‘alouze’ or ‘aloose,’ nearer than the modern form of the name to the Latin ‘alausa.’” The latest in this chain of spellings is of course _Alosa_, the scientific handle now applied to the shad, and in some texts to the alewife.