NOTICES OF BOOKS. xlv 



come under consideration, and by way of illustration there are twenty 

 beautifully executed plates, largely coloured, together with a number of 

 maps, woodcuts and tables. The work opens with a short preface, in 

 which its objects and scope are first defined and a contrast is drawn 

 between our present knowledge of the subject in hand and that ot 1883, 

 the year of the Great Fisheries Exhibition and of the Royal Commis- 

 sion on Trawling ; and there follows an Introduction, in which there are 

 considered the attitude of the public mind towards fishery questions, the 

 present stage of the fishing industry in the evolution of human aftairs, 

 together with some historical and preliminary remarks, in which among 

 other things the authors assert (not without justification) that in the 

 past "authorities entrusted with the patronage of posts in which marine 

 zoology could be studied, as a rule and with singular impartiality filled 

 them with those accustomed to other departments of the subject, while 

 men imbued with enthusiasm for marine zoology were stationed far in- 

 land ". A great deal of emphasis is in various parts of the book laid 

 upon the Trawling Commission afore-mentioned, with allusion amount- 

 ing almost to reverence for the late 13th Earl of Dalhousie, its chairman, 

 to whose memory the present volume is dedicated. The main contents 

 of the book are sharply divided into two parts ; a first and lesser part of 

 113 pages, which deals with the more general structure of the eggs, and 

 the broader aspects of the life-history, development, and rate of growth of 

 the fishes, and a second and greater part of considerably over 300 pages, in 

 which the life-histories of the species of the several families are more fully 

 considered. It is in the illustration of more especially the latter that the 

 twenty plates have been drawn ; and in that of the former there are a 

 series of excellent woodcuts, which delineate the young stages of some 

 of our more familiar food-fishes and were originally drawn in illus- 

 tration of a famous lecture delivered by the senior author before 

 the Royal Institution in 18S9. When, in 1875, Professor Mcintosh 

 published his treatise on the Marine Invertebrates and Fishes of 

 St. Andrews, expectation ran high, for it became evident that a 

 master mind was intent on the systematic study of the rich fauna 

 of that locality. The Royal Institution lecture was followed by 

 the publication in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edin- 

 burgh of an extensive monograph, in conjunction with Mr. E. E. 

 Prince, now Dominion Commissioner in Fisheries, Canada, "On the De- 

 velopment and Life-histories of the Teleostean Food and other Fishes," 

 perhaps the most generally interesting and important contribution to 

 the subject that has yet appeared by British authors. Treatise, lecture, 

 monograph, are now seen to have been stepping-stones in the formation 

 of the book under review, while the numerous magazine articles and 

 official reports which the senior author has in the meantime put forward 

 have long led us to speculate upon what would be possibly forthcoming 

 in it. The determination of the identity of the eggs and young of our 

 familiar food fishes, found as they are among heterogeneous assemblages 

 on the surface and in the shallower waters of the ocean, is a perplexing 

 task, demanding great patience and technical skill, which during only the 



