In addition to the investigation of these several mail-cheeked fishes it has been found necessary 

 to carefully examine certain special features in the cranial anatomy of several otlier fishes, these fishes 

 being mostly obtained here, though certain of them were sent me from America, by one of my assis- 

 tants, Mr. Wm. F. Allen. 



The Scorpaenidae are said by Gill to be the most generalized of the mail-cheeked fishes, and the 

 Scorpaenids to be the most generahzed of that family. Because of this, I begin the descriptions with 

 Scorpaena, selecting S. Scrofa because of its being larger than S. porcus. This fish is described with 

 considerable detail, for it is often the apparently unimportant features that are important in com- 

 parisons. Each cranial bone is described under its own special heading, and to make the descriptions 

 complete under each of these headings, some repetition has been unavoidable. As the descriptions 

 proceed, comparisons are at once made with fishes other than the mail-cheeked ones, no special sections 

 being devoted to comparative discussions alone. The other mail-cheeked fishes included in the 

 investigation, are, when described, compared, as much as possible, with Scorpaena scrofa only. 

 Scorpaena porcus, the skull of which, though smaller than S. scrofa otherwise closely resembles it, is 

 referred to only where appreciable differences were noticed. 



The nomenclature employed differs somewhat from that heretofore employed by me, for it has 

 seemed to me best to adopt, in large part, the current English names of the cranial bones. This will 

 appear in the descriptions of Scorpaena, and needs no special explanation here. 



During the investigation, which has been in progress during several years, I have had the con- 

 tinued aid of my three assistants at Menton, Mr. Jujiro Nomura, Mr. G. E. Nicholls and Mr. John 

 Henry, to whom the preparation of the material, the drawings used for Illustration and the literature 

 references were largely confided, circumstances obliging me to be frequently absent from the laboratory. 

 The dissections were almost all prepared by Mr. Henry. Mr. Henry also traced the nerve components 

 in the sections of Dactylopterus, Controlling also certain of the results obtained by me in the examin- 

 ation of the sections of Scorpaena and Lepidotrigla. The drawings were made by Mr. Nomura 

 from specially prepared specimens, not used for the descriptions, and because of frequently 

 occurring individual variations in different specimens the figures will be found to differ in certain 

 details from the descriptions. The descriptions give the usual conditions. 



When the work was nearly finished I received Supino's ('04/06) work on the Triglidae, in which 

 Scorpaena scrofa, Sebastes, Trigla lyra, Cottus, Peristedion and Dactylopterus are all described and 

 figured. But both the descriptions and the figures are so incomplete and so lacking in definite detail 

 that but little reference will be made to them. Garman's ('92) figure of Cottus octodecimospinosus, 

 given in his work on ,,The Discoboli", is equally indefinite and unsatisfactory. 



