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Almost all their species are good for eating. Many are of an 

 exquisite flavour, and there are some which arrive to a size 

 equal, if not superior, to that of the largest percoi'des. The 

 sciaena, for instance, of the European seas, becomes as large 

 as the variolas of the Nile and of the Ganges, or as the largest 

 polynemi, and many of the Johnius surpass our bass and 

 centropomi. 



The Mediterranean possesses three remarkable fishes of 

 this family ; the sciana (or maigre), the corvina, and the um- 

 brina, which always ought to have been, and in fact, always 

 have been, approximated to each other by naturalists ; many 

 of whom believe that they have found in them the sciaena or 

 umbrina of the ancients. Artedi, who did not sufficiently 

 distinguish the first two, united them with a third, in a genus, 

 which he named sciaena. He has endeavoured to determine 

 its characters, and if those which he has given do not en- 

 tirely agree with all the species which analogy leads us at 

 the present day to place in the family of the sciaenoi'des, they 

 represent pretty well the idea which he could form of it after 

 the only two with which he was acquainted. 



Linnaeus has adopted this genus, but adding some spe- 

 cies that did not belong to it, and modifying, in by no means 

 a happy manner, its genuine character. His pupils, and es- 

 pecially Forskal, have increased the disorder by attaching 

 themselves to one circumstance not very essential, to the 

 faculty which the true sciaenae possess with many other acan- 

 thopterygians, of concealing the dorsal spines between the 

 scales of the back. Bloch, considering but one circumstance 

 of just as little importance, and relative to the scales of the 

 operculum, has, again, combined the species otherwise than 

 his predecessors, and this genus, natural in the origin, is al- 

 together disfigured. Finally, to fill up the measure of fan- 

 tasy, the same Bloch in his Systema, published by Schneider, 

 has passed into the genus Johnius, the two only true sciaenae 



