452 Dr. Bancroft on the Sea- Devil of Jamaica, 



naturalists in Europe, and for the present, as new genera ought never to 

 be proposed without the clearest necessity, I shall content myself with 

 assuming that Cephalopterus is the proper genus, and proceed accord- 

 ingly. A new generic title, that of Dicerobatus, or two-horned Ray, 

 given by Blainville to another division of the Ray family, seems to be at 

 least as applicable to our fish as Cephalopterus, because the two flaps in 

 front look so exactly hke horns, when rolled up, as to have been always 

 believed to be such by the fishermen here ; but the type of this genus, 

 Raia fimbriata, differs so entirely from our fish by its lozenge shape, the 

 position of its eyes near each other on the dorsal surface, the want of a 

 dorsal fin, the fringed edge of the posterior part of its body from the tip 

 of the pectoral fins to that of the tail, and the form and size of the latter, 

 as to forbid its being classed in the same genus with the other. Two 

 species only appear to have been admitted into the genus Cephalopterus 

 by naturalists, the first of which, serving as the type of the genus, was for- 

 merly called Raia Giorna by La Cepede, and the second is the Raia 

 Massena of Risso's Ichthyologie de Nice. From the former of these, as 

 described by Dr. Shaw, our fish differs in not having its horns or frontal 

 flappers "blackish," longitudinally striated and marked with eight rows 

 of tubercles, in its dorsal and pectoral fins not being shaped like an 

 isosceles triangle, in its tail not being twice the length of the rest of the 

 animal nor smooth for about a quarter of its length and afterwards tuber- 

 culated on both sides, neither is its colour brown above with an oliva- 

 ceous cast on each side. Of the Raia Massena the only characters I find 

 in the books to which I have had access are the following, given by Bosc 

 in the Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle, viz. smooth, the edge 

 of the fins recurved, the horns black at their extremity, the tail with three 

 rows of rough points (asperites) : but of these characters the two which 

 relate to the recurved edge of the fins and to the triple row of points on 

 the tail, may suffice to show that it is of a different species from our fish. 

 In regard to the Raia Mobular, of which I have no description before me 

 but those in the Dictionary just mentioned, in Shaw's General Zoology, 

 and in Bonnaterre's Ichthyologie, I certainly find in these works some 

 particulars wherein it seems to resemble the fish we are treating of ; but 

 the following characters in which it differs clearly prove the latter to be 

 of a different species, viz. The head of moderate size, rectilinear in 



