252 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Feb. 



fishes were repulsive to him. Most people find the finny tribes 

 attractive whether gliding gracefully about in an aquarium, 

 or tugging at the end of a baited line, or smoking hot on a 

 dinner plate. Hence a book on fishes, especially if their 

 metallic and varied forms be artistically depicted in illustrative 

 plates, is coveted by everybody. It is surprising how deficient 

 our Canadian literature is in this respect. We have almost 

 unrivalled fish and fisheries, 3^et how few^ Canadian books to 

 tell us about them. The issue of this handsome, w^ell-illustrated 

 work bv the Board of Education, as one of the Series of Ver- 

 tebrate Lists issued with the imprimatur of the Minister of 

 Education, Toronto, is on every account notable. 



Professor Ramsay Wright long ago prepared, as an ap- 

 pendix to the Ontario Game and Fish Commission Report, a 

 description of economic fishes with plates, and it has been of 

 high utility and value. The Fisheries Department of Ontario 

 has also published more or less popular descriptions and plates 

 of fishes in its annual reports. The most of the plates in these 

 works have been reproductions of the well-known United States 

 Fishery Bureau figures, which have been most widelv and 

 generously loaned by the Washington authorities. The late 

 Mr. Montpetit, of Montreal, issued a book on our fresh-water 

 fishes, but it had little scientific value. 



Mr. Nash's book is very beautifully printed and contains 

 40 original drawings of fish, 32 being full-page plates and 8 

 small drawings in the text. The author has long been known, 

 for his skill as an artist and readers of the Canadian Magazine 

 have been delighted with his sketches of birds and fishes. The 

 present work shows him not only as an artist working con amore, 

 but an accurate student of nature. The text is thoroughly 

 scientific, and owes much, as all works on North American 

 fishes must do, to the classic volumes of Jordan and Evermann. 

 Had Mr. Nash relied more upon his own descriptive powers, as 

 an ardent naturalist, his work would have had increased value. 

 The technical descriptions by the famous American authors often 

 hide rather than reveal the characters of the fish described. 

 Mr. Nash might himself have described the common e^l, for 

 example, as "serpent-like in form, tail portion laterally flattened" 

 but in this list the description of the genus runs "bodv elongate, 

 sub-terete, compressed posteriorly, covered with embedded 

 scales which are linear in form and placed obliquelv, some of 

 them at right angles to the others." The common bow-fin or 

 lake dog-fish (Amia) has the "body oblong, compressed behind, 

 terete anteriorly, head subconical anteriorly bluntish, slightly 

 depressed, its superficial bones corrugated and very hard, 



