192 ACANTHOPTERYGII. FISTULARIAD^. 



crab-pots, in which they have been taken. Their 

 beauty, it is true, occasionally secures them a 

 place on the fishmonger's stall, when the speci- 

 mens, at least of the rarer species, are pretty sure 

 to be soon snatched up, not for the table, but for 

 the shelves of some museum. 



Family XVII. Fistulariad^. 



(Spinous Pipe-fishes.) 



Some of the Lahridce have the faculty of pro- 

 truding the mouth so excessively as to form a 

 tube ; and there is one genus, the Green Wrasses 

 {Gomphosis), of Ceylon, in which the mouth is 

 not protractile, but the bones are lengthened into 

 a permanent slender tube, at the extremity of 

 which is placed the mouth. Thus we are pre- 

 pared for the very limited but very curious and 

 interesting family of tube-mouthed fishes before 

 us. It has, however, other analogies, among the 

 soft -finned fishes ; as in the curious genus Mor- 

 myrus, found only in the Nile, considered by 

 Cuvier, as allied to the Pikes, which have a small 

 mouth set at the end of a slender tube ; but es- 

 pecially in the Syngnathidce, perhaps the most 

 interesting of the whole Class, for the singularity 

 of their organization and economy, in which the 

 bones of the face are prolonged into a tubular 

 snout, so similar to that of the present Family, 

 that both alike have received the popular appel- 

 lation of Pipe-fishes. 



The Fistulariadce, then, are characterized by 

 having the face prolonged into a slender tube 

 projecting forwards, composed of elongations of 



