296 HYBRIDS BETWEEN THE TURBOT AND THE BRILL. 
hybrids, but absent from the brill. A strong inflection of the 
dorsal profile behind the snout is noticeable in all turbot. It is, 
at best, but slightly marked in the brill, and in this the hybrids 
agree with the last-named species. 
As will be gathered from the description, the scales of the 
supposed hybrids differ at first sight very markedly from those of 
either the turbot or the brill, resembling rather the smaller non- 
imbricating skin-clad scales met with in the plaice, and especially in 
large examples. The resemblance to either brill or turbot only 
becomes apparent when we come to consider the real nature of the 
dermal apparatus of the last-named species. The turbot, as is well 
known, is clad in a deeply wrinkled skin, the wrinkles, on 
close inspection, being the depressions or sulci which separate a 
very irregularly arranged series of rather vesicular papille. Scales 
are only represented by a series of tubes, with very imperfect 
dorsal and ventral flanges, in connection with the sense-organs of 
the lateral line, and by large isolated tubercles, the apices or 
bosses of which are naked, while the bases are deeply embedded in 
the derma by a series of twisted irregular radical processes. Such 
tubercles in British examples are present only on the ocular side, 
except in “cyclopean” or in partially ambicolorate fish, in which 
they occur also to a greater or less extent on the blind side. In 
Norwegian fish, however, the tubercles, which are as a rule more 
numerous on the ocular side than in examples from our own seas, 
occur not infrequently on the blind side without any accompanying 
pigmentation. ‘The skin papille and wrinkles are equally present 
on either side in all examples. 
On the general surface of the body there is no very striking 
resemblance between the papille of the turbot and the scale cap- 
sules of the hybrid, but at the base of the interspinous ridges the 
skin of the two forms presents a fairly close resemblance, and I was 
led by this to institute a comparison of the skin armour of the 
two forms, which led me ultimately to the conclusion that the papille 
of the turbot’s skin were undoubtedly scale-capsules, in which the 
scales had failed to develop. This view I believed to be novel, but 
on the appearance of Professor Smitt’s edition of Fries, Ekstrom, 
and Van Wright’s History of Skandinavian Fishes I found it 
set forth (p. 434) that the skin is furnished with “ soft verrucose 
closed scale-sacs.” This interpretation of the papille may either 
be original, or, since the work in question is largely a compilation, 
may be collated from the observations of some earlier Skandinavian 
ichthyologist. I am entirely in accord with it, but, if it is set forth 
for the first time in the work referred to, it runs the risk of rejec- 
tion for want of evidence, since the matter is nowhere alluded to in 
