286 Papers from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Tortugcs. 



Next Schneider quotes Willughby (whom he says copies from Marc- 

 grave) and gives the arrangement and kind of teeth correctly for each jaw. 

 This being true, it is inexpHcable why he should have attributed the V-shaped 

 teeth to the upper jaw of his specimens, and all the more so since his figure 

 of the under side of the head of A . flagellum (the first ever published) shows 

 the long, projecting under jaw with angled teeth (see fig. 24, plate x). 

 Later we shall see that both Agassiz and Owen fell into the same error. 



However, Patrick Russell (1803), a physician in the employ of the East 

 India Company, residing at Vizagatapam on the coast of Coromandel, thus 

 speaks of the ocellated ray. Eel Tenkee (fig. 6, plate iii), which Gunther makes 

 A. narinari: 



Jaws dissimilar; the lower arched, narrow, projecting beyond the wider immovable 

 upper jaw; the edges of both are small, without teeth. 



He undoubtedly examined the jaws superficially, as his statement 

 "without teeth" would indicate, but this is probably an echo of Willughby, 

 whose book he had and who in turn merely copied Marcgrave. 



Blainville (18 16), in establishing the genus Aetobatus, contents himself 

 with merely speaking of the teeth as "broad, smooth, polygonal, united, 

 palatine." However, in 1828 when, without any cause discoverable he 

 changed the name to Aetobatis, he goes further: "Teeth large, smooth, poly- 

 gonal, united into two plates, one lingual, the other palatine." 



The first man after Sloane to study the tooth structure of the spotted 

 sting ray was Ruppell, who in 1835 described, from the Red Sea, an identical 

 form or one very closely related to A . narinari. Not only 

 did he accurately describe the ray but he both figured % % 



and described the teeth. Text-figure 8 is a reproduction / ^,^--\^ \ 

 of his drawing of the mouth and jaws of Myliobatis eel- 

 tenkee (synonym for A. narinari). He writes: 



The mouth itself is furnished both above and below with a flat- 

 tened bony mass, whereof that on the upper jaw is subdivided by 6 

 cross-furrows into 7 rectangular pieces lying one behind the other. 

 The bony plate of the lower jaw extends in front in a sharp angle; 

 it is smaller than the other and like it is divided by furrows running 

 parallel with the outer edge into 7 equal-sized angular pieces lying 

 one behind another. "' ^ 



That this jaw was sketched without removal from Text-fig. 8. Jaws 

 the body is plain both from the figure (note the nasal oiALeelteiikee.jrom 

 flaps and the dotted lines for the lower teeth) and from Ruppell, 1835. 

 the short count. This author was evidently unacquainted 

 with Marcgrave's and Sloane's earlier and more thorough work. 



One year later (1836) Louis Agassiz brought out the third volume of his 

 "Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles." In this volume he deals with the 

 Placoides, and in order to give them their proper setting he briefly takes 

 up the living forms. Of Raja narinari or Aetobatis narinari or Myliobatis 

 narinari (he uses all these names) he writes as follows: 



