324 PROCEEDINGS OP THE ACADEMY OF [1899. 



THE MARINE FISHES OF PERU. 

 BY JAMES FRANCIS ABBOTT. 



The study of the iclithyology of the west coast of South Amer- 

 ica, which was beguu by Valeucieuues iu the early volumes of the 

 Histolre Naturelle, has been carried ou since iu a very desultory way. 

 The only general works that have appeared have been the fairly 

 extensive Fauna Chilena of Claude Gay, published in 1848, and 

 the, ichthyologically, very incomplete Fauna Peruana of Tschudi, 

 published in 1845. The former contains descriptions of 108 

 species of fishes, the latter of but nineteen. Whatever work has 

 been done since has consisted merely of isolated descriptions of 

 single species or of small collections that have occasionally fallen 

 into investigators' hands. Tschudi himself made extensive collec- 

 tions in Peru, but through a series of misfortunes they were nearly 

 all lost. A few years before, the results of the voyage of " The 

 Beagle ' ' had been published, and the fishes collected by Darwin, 

 quite a number of which had been taken from the west coast of 

 South America, were described by Dr. Leonard Jenyns. 



But by far the greater number of the species known from this 

 region have been described by Kner and by Steindachner. The 

 Ichthyologuche Not'izen, which were published by the latter at 

 intei-vals from 1864 to 1870, and the Ichthyologische Beitrdge, 

 which followed from 1874 to 1882, contain numerous descriptions 

 of species from Peru and Chile. In 1867-68 Kner published the 

 results of his work upon the fishes in the Godeffroy Museum at 

 Plamburg, which contained many South American examples col- 

 lected by the captains of Hamburg merchant vessels. More 

 recently Steindachner has described the collection of fishes obtained 

 by Dr. L. Plate in his extensive exploration of Chile. ^ Many 

 of these are from Iquique, and are here included, while others 

 heretofore known only from Peru or northward are recorded from 

 Chilean waters for the first time. 



'Fauna Chilensis, ii, Supplement to Zoologische Jahrb'uchcr, July, 1S98. 



