IV PREFACE. 



but is of little real practical value. The plates are grossly colored, and some of 

 them are apparently drawn from memory. The text is meagre and insignificant.* 



In an unexpected quarter, appeared in 1787 an original work on the Fishes 

 of America. We allude to the Natural History of Cuba, by Antonio Parra, the 

 title of which will be found in our list of cited works. It is not exclusively con- 

 fined to fishes, but embraces Crustacea, marine plants, etc. There are forty 

 plates, illustrating seventy-one species of fishes, coarsely but vigorously executed 

 by his son ; and as far as we have had occasion to compare them with the origi- 

 nals, they are very correct. This work is exceedingly rare, and the copy in my 

 possession is believed to be the only one in the United States. The text is brief, 

 and of a popular character, without any attempt at classification or scientific 

 arrangement. Notwithstanding these defects, it will always remain, from its 

 original figures and its descriptions drawn from the recent specimens, a work of 

 great value to naturalists, and more especially to those of the Southern Atlantic 

 States. 



Pennant, an English writer on natural history, published in 1787 a supplement 

 to his Arctic Zoology, which contains an enumeration of one hundred and thirty 

 species of fishes, compiled chiefly from Linneus and Catesby. They are prin- 

 cipally from the waters of South-Carolina and the Gulf of Mexico. A very few, 

 scarcely exceeding six new species, are noticed more in detail, and these are 

 chiefly from the collection of Mrs. Anne Blackburne, whose brother apjaears to 

 have been a zealous collector for several years at Hempstead, Long island. 



In 1788, Schcepff, an army surgeon, who was in this country during the war 

 of the revolution, published in the Transactions of the Friends of Natural History 

 at Berlin, a memoir entitled " Descriptions of North American Fishes, chiefly 

 from the waters of New-York." His paper is for the most part a meagre cata- 

 logue of species from New- York and the gulf of Mexico, mostly identical with 

 those previously described by Linneus. In common with many of the observers 

 of that period, he had such a slavish deference to the great reformer of natural 

 science, that he scarcely dared to pronounce upon the validity of a species unless 



♦ In taking a review of what has been done in American ichthyology up to the period at which he wrote, Pennant breaks 

 out into the following apostrophe: " How small a part is this of the zoology of our lost dominions ! May what I have 

 " done be an inducement for some learned native to resume the subject! and I shall without envy see my trivial labors lost 

 '• in the immensity of new discoveries. Vain thought ! for ages must pass, ere the necessary perfection can be given, 

 " ere the animated nature which fills the space between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans can be investigated. Ages must 

 " pass, before new colonization can push its progress westwardly ; and even then, civilization, ease and luxury must take 

 " place ere those studies in which use and amusement are so intimately blended can be carried into effect." 



