98 Records of the Indian Museum. [Voi,. XIX, 



this in Garman's opinion amounts to republication after ist Janu- 

 ary, 1758, the date of the development of the System of Lin- 

 naeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. No author, 

 however, has accepted Garman's version ; Jordan and Evermann,' 

 after considering the additional arguments of Garman, are of the 

 opinion that the generic names of Klein in Neuer Schaiiplatz are of 

 very doubtful eligibility, as even in this work the lyinnean code 

 is not adopted for species, and* further because the dictionary is an 

 anonymous publication with an " elliptical and disorderly" method 

 of exposition. In view of these facts it does not seem desirable to 

 displace such well established names as Torpedo by Klein's nomen- 

 clature. 



There is a further difficulty regarding the author of the name 

 Torpedo. Giinther*^ assigned it to Dumeril,^ who established the 

 genus in 1806 with Raja torpedo as the t^^pe. Houttuyn {loc. cit.) 

 had in 1764, however, used the name Torpedo without assigning a 

 type, but his description of the fish fixes the Electric Ray — Raja 

 Torpedo^ Linn, as the type. I have, therefore, accepted Houttuyn 

 as the author of the genus Torpedo. 



Torpedo marmorata, Risso. 



1870. Torpedo ynarmorata, Giinther, Brit. Ahis. Cat. FisJies \^III, 



p. 450. 

 1909. Torpedo marmorata, Annandale, Op. cit., p. 42. 

 1913. Narcacion marmoratus, Garman, Op. cit., p. 305. 



Garman's work, in connection with his description of the 

 distribution of this species, calls for some further criticism. Except 

 in a few instances, he has ignored Annandale's valuable papers* 

 on the Indian Elasmobranchs. For example, he gives the dis- 

 tribution of T. marmorata as " Mediterranean Sea and Eastern 

 Atlantic," leaving out the record of the occurrence of this species 

 at Puri on the Orissa coast. There is in the collection of the 

 Zoological Survey another specimen taken near Vizagapatam on the 

 same coast. Zugmayer ^ has also recorded the occurrence of this 

 species (with a closely allied one) on the Oman and Mekran 

 coasts of Baluchistan. The species, therefore, has a wide distri- 

 bution in the Indian seas. 



The closely allied species T. zugmayeri described by Engel- 

 hart * from a female specimen collected by Dr. E. Zugmayer off 

 Baluchistan on the Mekran coast is quite distinct from T. marmor- 

 ata, as I have satisfied myself by the examination of a male speci- 

 men of this species preserved in the Quetta Museum. It is dis- 

 tinguished from T. marmorata in having semilunar instead of 

 circular spiracles, much smaller though more numerous spiracular 



' Genera of Fishes, pp. 35-37. Leland Stan. Univ. Pub. California (1917). 



I Brit. Mus. Cat. Fishes, VIII, p. 448 (1870). 



^ Zool. Analyt., p. 102 (1806). 



* Mem. hid. Miis. II, pp. 1-60, pis. i-v ( 1909), and ibid., Ill, pp. 1-6 (1910). 



6 Abh. Kon. Bayer. Akad. Wiss. Miinchen XXVI, Bd. 6, pp. 1-35 (1913)- 



^ Zool. Anz., Bd. XXXIX, Nr. 21-22, p. 647 (1912). 



