286 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 



and he was more distinctly "conservative" than either Bleeker or Gill. It 

 has long been a sort of tradition in the British Museum that whatever is 

 not found there probably does not exist. Dr. Gill saw more clearly than 

 either of the other two the nature of the classification of the future. His 

 generic names have as a rule a sound basis, the exceptions being mainly 

 among those based on erroneous records of other writers. 



In addition to the large expansion of generic names among species 

 already known, the years between 1858 and 1880 mark great accessions 

 of knowledge of the life of the oceanic depths, a series of discoveries due 

 mostly to the voyages of the Challenger and the Albatross, and made 

 known in England by Dr. Giinther, and in America by Goode and Bean. 

 To this period belong also the extensive studies of the fresh-water fishes 

 of the United States and the marine fishes of the Eastern Pacific as con- 

 ducted by Jordan and Gilbert. Most of the excellent papers of Franz 

 Steindachner in Vienna, Leon Vaillant in Paris, Christian F. Liitken in 

 Copenhagen, and Joseph Leidy and Edward D. Cope in Philadelphia, oc- 

 cur in this period. 



I express again my obligations to Barton A. Bean of the United 

 States National Museum, to Masamitsu Oshima, now Scientific Expert of 

 the Fisheries Bureau at Taihoku, Formosa, and to Henry Weed Fowler 

 of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia for assistance in veri- 

 fying records and in examining rare publications. Dr. Louis Hussakof of 

 New York, Theodore D. A. Cockerell of Boulder, Colorado, Allan R. Mc- 

 Culloch, Edgar R. Waite, and J. Douglas Ogilby have also furnished 

 valuable notes. I am again indebted to Mr. R. A. Nelgner of the Stanford 

 University Press for his efiforts in securing accuracy and in the prepara- 

 tion of the index. My obligations to Weber and de Beaufort's Index of the 

 Ichthyological Papers of P. Bleeker, to Bashford Dean's Bibliography of 

 Fishes, to Oliver Perry Hay's Fossil Vertebrata of North America'^ and to 

 Arthur Smith Woodward's Catalogue of the Fossil Fishes in the British 

 Museum have been great and constant. 



David Starr Jordan. 

 Stanford University, California, 

 August 10, 1919 ; Issued October 25, 1919. 



