AMERICAN FISHES. 



Mackinnon's experiment, tells me that the fish taken were the common 

 species of New England flat-fishes and flounders. 



We fancy that the inspiration of the new advocate of the turbot-in- 

 America question, as well as the information upon which he bases his con- 

 clusion, was drawn from this very same book of Capt. Mackinnon, for 

 he uses many of the same phrases, and he repeats, in almost the same 

 words. Captain Mackinnon's statement: "The fish markets in America 

 are not all in keeping with the size and wealth of the States," a statement 

 which, however true it may have been thirty years ago, will be amusing to 

 any one who has recently had opportunity to compare the fish markets of 

 America and Europe. This ingenious Philadelphia savant sums up his 

 evidence as follows : 



"The Turbot, Sole, and Plaice are, however, in abundance in your 

 deep-water sand banks. They were caught there in 1S12 by English sailors, 

 and in iSSo Turbot have been obtained off Atlantic City, if the 'Balti- 

 more American' is any authority." 



The notion that the introduction of the English trawl in America would 

 be novel and would at once open up a field for a fishery industry of bound- 

 less extent, deserves a word. The trawl has been assiduously used by the 

 summer collecting party of the United States Fish Commission for ten 

 years past, and also by Prof. Agassiz upon various exploring trips. The 

 steamers of the Fish Commission have used it on every portion of the 

 coast, from Yucatan to Halifax. Prof. Agassiz has used it in the 

 Gulf of IVlexico and on the coast of Florida, and has employed 

 it in running five lines of research at right angles to the coast from Cape 

 Hatteras, at points nearly equidistant between Charleston and Cape Cod, 

 one of them directly out from the entrance to Delaware Bay. The 

 dredgings of the Fish Commission Avere carried from near the shore to a 

 depth of nearly five miles in the open sea, and covered a very wide area 

 of the ocean bottom. 



In 1854 Prof. Baird made a careful exploration of the coast of New Jer- 

 sey with especial reference to the fishes, and since that time every stretch 

 of coast line from Brownsville, Texas, to Eastport, Me., has been 

 thoroughly investigated by the naturalists of the United States Fish Com- 

 mission. It is true that a new species of fish is occasionally discovered, but 

 the new fishes always belong to one of two classes. They are either 

 swift-swimming species, members of the West Indian fauna, which come. 



