191 1] Japanese Ichthyology 



crushing taxes, the accumulating wealth of the 

 "narikin" 1 and the growing unrest of the people 

 made the prospect anything but hopeful. With him, 

 as with other foreign importers, things went finan- 

 cially from bad to worse. Shortly before his death in 

 1915 his valuable collections were bought, at my 

 suggestion, by the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. 



One of the leading purposes of my first trip to 

 Japan had been to put the study of the native fishes 

 in such shape that local naturalists could them- 

 selves continue it by means of bibliography and new 

 descriptions. Mitsukuri (who passed away in 1909) 

 was much interested in this plan, and arranged to 

 have systematic work undertaken by the College of 

 Science in the Imperial University, Dr. Shigeho 

 Tanaka, a young naturalist, being accordingly ap- 

 pointed ichthyologist. The various reviews of differ- 

 ent groups of Japanese forms, some ninety-five 

 memoirs in all, published from 1901 to 1913 by my 

 Stanford colleagues and myself, gave Tanaka the 

 necessary clues, and he has since carried on the work 

 with industry and accuracy. In 1913 the Imperial 

 government put out a "Catalogue of the Fishes of 

 Japan," 2 recording the 1237 species known at that 

 time. To this list Tanaka has made many important 

 additions, and quite recently (1919) a wealthy patron 

 provided a large sum for continuance of the work. 



The first native naturalist to interest himself seri- 

 ously in the ichthyology of Japan was Ishikawa. In 

 1910, when Norway celebrated at Bergen the birth- 

 day of her most eminent zoologist, Michel Sars, 



1 "New rich" literally, "become kings," thus compared to the queening 

 of pawns in chess. 



2 By Jordan, Tanaka, and Snyder; see Chapter XLI, page 445. 



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