448 Dr. Bancroft on the Sea-Devil of Jamaica* 



extremity with a tongue-shaped lobe (the flappers already described) from 

 between which a segment of a circle seems to have been scooped out ; 

 while the hinder part of the body ends in a somewhat semicircular form. 

 Its length from the snout to the tip of the ventral fins, as taken over the 

 convexity of the back, measured six feet and a half; its breadth taken in 

 the same way was about five feet, and its thickness in the middle from the 

 dorsal to the sternal aspect eighteen inches. The pectoral fins extended 

 about four feet and a half beyond the body on each side, in the form of 

 an acute angle sHghtly bowed backwards, measuring about three feet at 

 their base, while the distance between their tips was not less than four- 

 teen feet. The Sea-Devil killed near Fort Augusta in October 1823 by 

 Lieutenants St. John and Lamont, some account of which was given in the 

 eleventh volume of the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, a female with 

 young, was larger, being fifteen feet in extreme breadth, and more than 

 three feet thick in the body. The ventral fins were by the side of the 

 tail, ten inches long, and five broad ; but two-thirds of their breadth on 

 the upper surface were covered by the posterior ends of the pectoral fins. 

 The dorsal fin was about ten inches long, and seven high at its extremity, 

 and stood partly on the back, that is for two-thirds of its length, and the 

 rest on the root of the tail. I was told that the tail must have measured 

 originally about five feet and a half in length; but fifteen inches or more 

 of the end of it, which had been held in the hand, was broken off in one of 

 the fish's struggles. It was very slender, being only eight inches in cir- 

 cumference at its root, four or five inches below which it swelled into a 

 knob nearly as large as the root ; and inmiediately beyond the knob the 

 circumference was but five inches, whence the tail regularly tapered to a 

 point. It was quadrangular and channelled on the right and left side. At 

 the back of the knob a spine issued from a deep groove, that in a full 

 grown fish, as I learn from Lieutenant St. John, is from six to seven inches 

 long, slender, triangular, finely barbed on the edges, and slightly curved 

 upwards towards the end. Our fish wanted the spine, which from the 

 appearance of the groove, it seemed to have recently cast. In the Rays 

 the tail-spine has commonly been described as two edged. Although the 

 animal was a male, there were no traces of those pendulous appendages 

 between the ventral fin and the tail, which naturalists seem to have agreed 



