112 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Dec. 



Many years ago, when I was the Naturalist at the Scottish 

 Marine Station, St. Andrews, I paid special attention to Myxine, 

 for the reason that no one had ever seen a male specimen, and 

 very little was known about its eggs. One egg oflly was known 

 to scientific men, so far as I am aware, viz., a single specimen 

 in the Bergen Museum, Norway. No doubt it was the study 

 of this unique and valuable specimen vv^hich enabled Professor 

 Allen Thomson, of Glasgow, to describe and figure the hag- 

 fish's egg in his article "Ovum," in Todd and Bowman's En- 

 cyclopagdia of Anatomy. I dissected many htmdreds of speci- 

 mens and found plenty of eggs, yellowish brown, very hard to 

 the touch, and about the size of a small bean. Each egg was 

 narrow at the two ends, as Professor Thomson had described, 

 but I never found the bunch of hooks at both apices, which 

 appeared in his description and figure. Carl Claus, in his 

 "Zoology," says that "the deposited egg is recognisable by the 

 filaments attached to both poles, and which probably serve to 

 fix it to sea weeds," while Professor Arthur Thomson, of Aber- 

 deen (Outlines of Zoology, 1892) states that "each has an oval 

 horny case, with knobbed processes at each end. By these 

 they become entangled together." In Dr. Lenn's "Synopsis 

 der Thierkunde," Hanover, 1883, Bd. I., Professor Hubert Lud- 

 wig describes the "horny shell as provided at both ends with a 

 long bunch of thread-like hooks." This bunch of threads or 

 filaments is evidently pushed out after the eggs are deposited, 

 for I saw no trace of them in the large number of eggs, many 

 thousands,. which I removed from ripe hagfish in Scotland. I 

 may add that I found no males, and this was due to a fact, one 

 of the most astonishing in the whole field of zoology, viz., that 

 only the very small specimens are males, and, as they grow 

 bigger, each changes its sex, and, later in life, produces not 

 sperms but eggs. This sex-transformation, first discovered 

 by Mr. J. T. Cunningham, and by the famous Dr. Nansen, is 

 called ' ' protandry . ' ' 



It was with very great delight that I found in July last 

 some of these exceedingly rare objects, the ripe- eggs of Myxine, 

 at the Biological Station, St. Andrews, N.B. Professor Philip 

 Cox, of Fredericton, who was engaged in scientific researches 

 at the station, had placed them in a sea-v/ater tank, under a 

 constant circulation of water, with the hope that they might 

 hatch out. The larval hagfish has never been seen by any 

 zoologist, and a description of it wotild be of the profotindest 

 scientific interest. After several weeks the eggs died and began 

 to show signs of decay, and before their condition was too ad- 

 vanced I made a study of their external features. In view of 

 my work on Myxine in Scotland, I felt a special interest in ex- 



