tention that the scales of plectognaths have much in 

 common with those of ganoids. Just as Muller had purg- 

 ed the Ganoides, so he also rid (p. 26) the Scleroderms of 

 Agassiz's Blochius, Dercetis, and Rhinellus. Elsewhere 

 (p. 78-79) Muller gave systematic notes on the tetraodon- 

 toids, based on the structure of the nasal aperture and 

 tube. The character of the nasal organ was thereafter to 

 play an important (and exaggerated) role in the classi- 

 fication of the tetraodontoids. Muller made a clear state- 

 ment (p. 84) of the fact that the maxillary and premaxil- 

 lary are not fused or firmly attached to one another in all 

 of the plectognaths, as Cuvier had said that they were, 

 for he noted that in the triacanthoids these two bones 

 have a more normal relationship to one another. 



Muller's contribution to the classification of fishes was 

 so outstanding that the outline given above in relation to 

 the plectognaths cannot do it justice, for his was the 

 finest classification of fishes to appear up until that time, 

 and in the magnitude of the changes it wrought in ich- 

 thyology it was at least equal to the work of Artedi and 

 Cuvier. 



With Agassiz saying one thing about the highly 

 modified scales and teeth of plectognaths and with 

 Muller saying something else, a controversy broke out in 

 the literature which has not yet been fully resolved (see 

 references under subsequent discussion of Owen). 



Some of Muller's classificatory conclusions came in for 

 immediate criticism. Vogt (1845) took exception to 

 Muller's recognition of the Orders Pharyngognathi and 

 Plectognathi. Vogt thought these orders to have been 

 founded on insufficient criteria, i.e., the fusion of the 

 lower pharyngeals in the Pharyngognathi and the fusion 

 of the upper jaw bones in the Plectognathi. 



Muller's classification is discussed here slightly out of 

 chronological order so that it can be more easily com- 

 pared with that of Agassiz. Intervening between these 

 two monumental works were the classifications of Swain- 

 son, Nardo, and Bonaparte. 



In his (1832) "Saggio d'una Distribuzione Metodica" 

 Bonaparte adopted a classification that was basically 

 that of Cuvier's (1817) "Le Regne Animal," but with sig- 

 nificant changes in the rank of the groups recognized. 

 Bonaparte introduced here for the first time, in a con- 

 sistent manner, the "idae" ending for familial and the 

 "ini" for subfamilial names for his Classe Pisces. Bona- 

 parte recognized two monotypic orders in his Sezione 3, 

 or Plectognathi: the Gymnodontes (for the family 

 Tetraodontidae) and the Sclerodermi (for the family 

 Balistidae). 



The Tetraodontidae contained the usual four genera: 

 Diodon, Tetraodon, Orthagoriscus, and Triodon. The 

 Balistidae contained three genera: Ostracion, Triacan- 

 thus, and Balistes (with the latter divided into four sub- 

 genera: Batistes, Balistapus, Monacanthus, and Aluterus) . 



In his (1841a) magnum opus, the "Iconografia della 

 Fauna Italica," Bonaparte treated the plectognaths as 

 one of the three sezione (along with the Micrognathi and 

 Teleostomi) of the Sottoclasse Pomatobranchii (in con- 

 trast to the Elasmobranchii, Lophobranchii, and Mar- 

 sipobranchii) as follows: 



Sezione Plectognathi 

 Ordine Sclerodermi 

 Famiglia Balistidi [sic] 

 [Subfamily] Balistini 

 [Subfamily] Ostraciontini 

 Ordine Gymnodontes 

 Famiglia Tetraodontidae 

 [Subfamily] Tetraodontini 

 [Subfamily] Diodontini 

 Famiglia Orthagoriscidae 

 [Subfamily] Orthagoriscini 

 [Subfamily] Molini. 



In the same year, Bonaparte (1841b) published his "A 

 New Systematic Arrangement of Vertebrae Animals," 

 and the classification adopted was that outhned above, 

 with only minor changes. In the plectognaths, for ex- 

 ample, the one difference was that in the family 

 Orthagoriscidae only one subfamily was recognized, the 

 Orthagoriscini, which was thus equal to his previous 

 two subfamilies, Orthagoriscini and Molini. 



The classification used by Swainson (1838, 1839) in his 

 "Natural History of Fishes, Amphibians, and Reptiles" 

 was, like the rest of his work, a careless hodge-podge. The 

 pseudometaphysical "systems" by which Oken (1816) 

 compared orders of fishes with various classes of inver- 

 tebrates and vertebrates obviously made an impression 

 on Swainson, for the latter carried on where the former 

 had left off. To Swainson the plectognaths were equated 

 with such groups as amphibians and turtles, whereas 

 Oken had equated them with mammals. Swainson 

 (1838:189) included all of the plectognaths (or Cheloni- 

 form Order) in a family Balistidae, in which were 

 recognized five subfamilies: Balistinae, Ostracinae, 

 Cephalinae, Diodoninae, and Tetraodinae, each of which 

 included the expected forms. 



Nardo (1842) presented a brief outline of his classi- 

 fication of the Sclerodermi, in which he closely followed 

 Bonaparte (1832), but attributed all of the familial 

 names to himself. 



The first person after Cuvier to extensively analyze the 

 classification of the plectognaths as a whole was Dareste. 

 His first paper ( 1849) dealt with the osteology of Triodon 

 macropterus, the monotypic representative of its family. 

 Dareste saw that Triodon had many features in common 

 with the gymnodonts, but that it also possessed certain 

 characteristics of the scleroderms. One might expect that 

 this would strengthen the union of these two groups in an 

 Order Plectognathi. Such was not the interpretation of 

 Dareste, however, for he concurred with Vogt's (1845:67) 

 belief that the Order Plectognathi was ill-defined, un- 

 natural, and not long for this world. Although Dareste 

 made this point in his work on Triodon, he did not sub- 

 stantiate it with a discussion until 1850, in his 

 "Recherches sur la Classification de i'Ordre des Plectog- 

 nathes." In the latter work Dareste took apart Cuvier's 

 definition of the Order Plectognathi sentence by sen- 

 tence. To review very briefly Dareate's critique, he stated 



