320 SUPPLEMENT ON 



A fourth tribe of the family of the sparoidesis composed of 

 species which have on the front of the jaws a range of flatted 

 teeth, crowded one against another, including originally in 

 the text of the Regne Animal only two genera, to which the 

 Baron, in his great work on this class, has added two others, 

 making four in all. These are Boops, which have no other 

 teeth behind those on the edge of the jaws, and which are 

 notched ; SCATHARUS, with the teeth also in a single rank, 

 but flatted, pointed, and not notched; OblAda, which have 

 behind their notched incisors a band of small and crowded 

 teeth ; and Crenideus, with denticulated incisors, and a 

 group of small tuberculous teeth behind them. 



The smallness of their mouth, and the weakness and short- 

 ness of the spinal rays of their vertical fins, distinguish these 

 genera, moreover, from those in other respects near them. 



The common Boops is a species very abundant in the Me- 

 diterranean, which has, in common with the salpa, another 

 species equally common in the same sea, a character in the 

 teeth already alluded to, from which both may properly be 

 united in a small genus. These live on marine plants, and 

 accordingly their intestinal canal is very long, though they 

 have few appendages round the pylorus. The two species, 

 both of the European seas, are well known, and have been 

 long celebrated for the beauty of their colour, and quality of 

 their flesh as food. 



The boops spawns twice a year, and then comes toward 

 the shore in shoals, at which time especially it is much 

 prized for the table. Its fecundity is very useful to the in- 

 habitants of the coast of Provence and of Nice, where the 

 simple fishermen employed in taking them fancy they pro- 

 mote their object, by suspending to their boat little silver 

 figures of this fish. It appears, however, that in Spain it is 

 eaten only by the poorer sort of people, though so generally 

 esteemed elsewhere. 



