BY J. DOUGLAS OGILBY. 391 



protest against the practice which is so prevalent among writers 

 on our fishes of copying the descriptions and remarks from the 

 British Museum Catalogue without any attempt being made to 

 test their accuracy, and by so doing perpetuating error, creating 

 confusion, and indefinitely postponing the dawn of that accurate 

 knowledge of our native fauna which every admirer of the 

 marvellous products of our country must ardently desire. 



Yery different, however, is Count Castelnau's contribution; in 

 it we find by far the best account of two of our species as yet 

 published, and though in the case of one of them the author had 

 evidently determined the species wrongly, this does not detract 

 from the value of his remarks, while the very accuracy of his 

 description has enabled me to correct his error without difficulty, 

 a thing which would have been impossible had he also been con- 

 tent to be a mere copyist. Following his usual practice he has, 

 however, given generic and specific names to two individuals, one 

 of which was an ammocoete while the other had only just passed 

 through its metamorphosis and assumed the habits and in part 

 the dentition of the adult. Count Castelnau's long experience 

 should have taught him to avoid this pitfall. His paper, there- 

 fore, increased the number of Australasian species to six, distri- 

 buted among four genera, and at this they have been left up to 

 the present time by all writers, even Sir William Macleay 

 republishing without comment the descriptions of these nominal 

 species in his Catalogue of Australian Fishes, where, at least, we 

 might have expected that some effort would haVe been made to 

 correct the errors of his predecessors. 



I append here in parallel columns the names of the species as 

 given by Macleay and those which I recognise as valid in the 

 following paper : — 



Mordacla mordax Mordacia mordax. 



Neomordacia hoivittii^ 



Geotria chilensis I Velasia stenostomus. 



Yarra singularis ] 



Geotria austraUs \ 



n , ■ II .• \-Geotria australis. 



breotria allporti J 



