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ON SOME AUSTRALIAN ELEOTRIN^. 

 By J. Douglas Ooilby. 



Up to the present time all Australian writers on ichthyology 

 have been content to follow the author of the British Museum 

 Catalogue of Fishes {1S59-1870) in collecting all the various 

 forms of the Eleotrine Gobies in a single large, heterogeneous, and 

 unwieldy genus; under the common name Eleotris this is made to 

 include a number of fishes, which, although ha^•ing a general 

 resemblance to one another in their habits and mode of life, have 

 developed such widely diverse structural peculiarities that the 

 impossibility of maintaining the intimate connection inaugurated 

 in that work, and subsequently adhered to in other important 

 papers by the same author, becomes immediately apparent to 

 anyone to whom the opportunity of studying the fishes themselves 

 is given. 



In the paper here submitted, I have, therefore, endeavoured to 

 separate into natural groups certain of our common south-eastern 

 cismontane species, in the hoj^e that the proposed genera will 

 form a nucleus round which to gather a part at least of our 

 Australasian forms and so facilitate the identification of the 

 remainder. 



In undertaking even this partial revision of our El<olrince, I 

 am, however, placed at a great disadvantage through my inability 

 to consult Dr. Bleeker's paper on the divisions of the Gobiidce, no 

 copy of which is obtainable in Sydney, nor indeed, so far as I am 

 aware, does one exist in any of the Australian Colonies. It is 

 quite possible, therefore, that one or other of the four genera 

 here proposed may be identical with one of Bleeker's, but the 

 advantage to my fellow-workers in Australia of having a clear 

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