18 ON THE ICHTHYOLOGICAL SYSTEM 



sent moment, as successive volumes of his great work appear, 

 we find that the ameliorations which have been from time to 

 time introduced still undergo revisals and further improve- 

 ments. 



Before his first publication on the subject in 1815, the 

 methods adopted by nearly all Ichthyological writers, although 

 apparently very different from each other, were nevertheless 

 only modifications of the Linnsean system, with new names. 

 Some having no alterations, excepting that they introduced 

 classes, pretended to be imperfect, and founded upon the 

 supposed absence of a part of the branchial teguments, as 

 advanced by Lacepede, or upon the nature of the gill rays, as 

 they are represented in Artedi. All these arrangements being 

 purely conventional or artificial, produce an irremediable ob- 

 jection, in the remote separations which they cause, of species 

 naturally allied or approximating ; and moreover in their 

 assigning characters not always to be found in the species 

 they include. But our author, having for nearly forty years 

 studied Ichthyology, not only in authors but much more the 

 subjects themselves, in their viscera and their skeletons, after 

 dissecting several hundred species, satisfied his mind that no 

 acanthopterygian fish should ever be mixed with those of any 

 other family ; and that the acanthopterygians, constituting 

 three-fourths of all the known species of fish, are also the 

 type most perfected by nature and most homogeneous in all 

 the variations it has received 1 . 



From the year 1817, when the Tableau duRegne Animal first 

 appeared, the Baron having shown the erroneous characters 

 derived from the opercula and rays, suppressed the old order 



every part of the Muscovite Empire ; Messrs. Quoy and Gaymard, Garnot, 

 and Lesson, from the Pacific Ocean ; and many others from the north of 

 Europe, and the rivers and lakes of Germany, France, and Italy. 



1 Acanthopterygians include all the fish having complete gills and fins, 

 partly armed with spines or pointed bones. 



