SEXUAL CHARACTERS — ELASMOBRANCH FISHES 213 



of the male, with the directive groove to guide the latter into 

 it. Possibly the spongy mass at the base of the female pouch, 

 will, in the future, be revealed not as a gland for secretion, but 

 as a body for the absorption of the secret" on of the gland of the 

 male whose function might be hedonistic. 



The whole of the closed portion of the posterior clasper tube 

 in the male and the cavity of its proximal end is filled with 

 decomposed debris. Possibly this is what Schneider pronounced 

 to be spermatozoa (Memoir I, p. 265) as there is no reason why 

 it should not be, but it is not stored in what I am terming a 

 siphon in these papers, since Callorhynchus does not possess one. 



Save that it is stouter and curved in a different manner, the 

 frontal clasper closely resembles that of Chimaera (fig. 8, B). 

 It is limited to the male sex. 



The material, which is nearly fifty years old, is not in a good 

 enough state of preservation to make out the following points, 

 which will have to be supplemented in a future memoir from 

 fresh material. 1) The nature of the cavity and its walls in the 

 proximal end of the posterior claspers in the male. 2) The 

 nature of the walls of the pouch of the female. 3) The presence 

 of a body and its nature in the pouch of the female. 



TORPEDO MARMORATA 



The electric ray 



Note. In none of the Batoidei that follow in this memoir is the siphon tube 

 carried down the clasper to open by an aperture posterior to the hypopyle as it 

 does in Raia circularis (Memoir I, p. 260). 



The largest specimen, from which figure 15 is drawn, was 

 captured at Algoa Bay in 1891, and measures 43 cm. in length. 

 This study has also been supplemented from other animals from 

 Madras. 



The claspers are singularly blunt and clumsy, and terminate in 

 a double spoon-shaped conformation, suggestive of a burrowing 

 bivalve mollusc, e.g., Solen. On their outer edge is a long slit 

 whose cavity does not lead forward and only slightly backward. 

 This is neither a pseudosiphon, which has been defined for Galeus 



