310 Papers from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Tortugas. 



off by accident," with a dorsal fin and five spines very similar to those found 

 on my best Beaufort specimen. Their figure of the fish was lost, and, what 

 is most of all to be regretted, they omit any description of those structures, 

 the teeth, which would have forever settled the question of identification. 

 At first the present writer was inclined to admit the identity, but further 

 study has brought out certain objections. 



Text-fig. i8. Myliobaiis macroptera, after 

 McClelland, India. 



Text-fig. 19. Ventral view of head 

 region of same. 



Quoy and Gaimard preserved the tail and deposited it in the Museum 

 (of Paris?) and in their plates give a figure of it. A photograph of this draw- 

 ing and of my 4-spined Beaufort specimen is shown in figure 7, plate iv. 

 It is very noticeable that the large white spot found on the upper and back 

 part of the dorsal of A. narinari is absent from that of the 5-spined ray. 

 In all the dorsals of both Beaufort and Key West specimens examined by 

 me, it has been present save in one only, and it a badly preserved one. 

 This objection alone is, however, not of sufficient weight to negative the 

 identity, but in the course of this research the present writer chanced upon 

 a description by Miklouho-Maclay and Macleay (1886) of a spotted ray, 

 Myliobatis ptinctatus, from the Admiralty and Hermit Islands. This ray 

 also had: (i) an elongated snout turned up at the tip; (2) the upper surface 

 (greenish-gray) dotted with (irregularly scattered dirty -white) spots; (3) a 

 short tail with a dorsal followed by two serrated spines. So far the de- 

 scriptions are quite parallel, and the figures of this latter ray (No. 21, plate 

 viii) might well be taken for the former, but these authors go on to describe 

 what the others do not, the teeth which are in "many longitudinal rows." 

 To the present writer it seems quite as easy to identify the 5-spined ray as 

 Myliobatis punctatus as A. narinari, and because of these doubts he prefers 

 to omit it from his table of synonyms. 



