THE BONY FISHES 111 



fish (Lophius) of the North Atlantic coast; the toadfish 

 (Opsanus) of the Atlantic coast from Brazil to Cape 

 Cod, including the sheltered waters of the Chesapeake 

 Bay and Long Island Sound; the midshipman (Torich- 

 thys) of the Pacific coast; the batfish {Ogcocephalus) 

 of the West Indies; the marbled angler or mousefish of 

 the Sargasso Sea (Histrio); the well-known sea horse 

 (Hippocampus) and the pipefish (Syngnathus) ; the 

 clingfishes (Lepadogaster and Gobiesox); and several 

 exotic deep-sea forms. 



And yet the picture is sometimes muddled: for ex- 

 ample, the common longhom sculpin (Myoxocephalus 

 octodecimspinosus) invariably shows good glomerular 

 development, while the closely related shorthorn 

 (daddy) sculpin (M. scorpius) presents the unique situ- 

 ation that some individuals show good glomerular de- 

 velopment whereas others, even under the most rigorous 

 functional tests, are proved to be completely aglomeru- 

 lar. GraflEin believed that in M. scorpius the glomeruli 

 were lost as the fish grew older and larger, but the more 

 recent observations of R. P. Forster show no correlation 

 with size or presumably with age, and Forster concludes 

 that the aglomerular condition is randomly distributed 

 wdthin this single species. 



The fist of aglomerular fishes is not longer than it is 

 chiefly because the highly specialized fishes from the 

 ocean depths have not been carefully studied with re- 

 spect to renal anatomy. The writer once labored under 

 the delusion that he could tell an aglomerular fish by 

 looking at the creature: in this he was quite wrong be- 

 cause there are many queer-looking fishes that still have 

 fairly good glomeruli, but the intuition was not wholly 

 false because the deep-sea fishes are among the strang- 

 est-looking of all animals; they are specialized for life in 

 the oceanic depths into which scarcely a ray of daylight 

 penetrates and where they are never disturbed by any 

 marked change in temperature, or by rain, wind, or 

 Ivmar tide (whatever submarine tides may sweep them 



