ANNOTATED LIST OF THE SPECIES 349 
The alimentary canal practically without a stomach, the intestine long, much 
longer than the fish, sometimes twice as long. 
The most obvious differences between Empetrichthys and Orestias are that the 
former has a double series of teeth in the jaws, the mouth is terminal (though 
oblique), and that the dorsal fin is in a more posterior position. 
Myers points out that more deep-seated differences exist (see above) which 
throw Empetrichthys nearer the funduline group, the outstanding one being that in 
Empetrichthys parietals are found, absent in Orestias. 
Cyprinodontiform fishes isolated almost altogether from all other types by the 
great altitude of the altiplane on which they live, upland plateaux or pampas be- 
tween the great cordilleras. These extend for more than a thousand miles from 
near Cerro de Pasco to southwestern Bolivia and Chile, mainly at 12000 to 13500 
feet above sea level. At some points the fishes have attained elevations of approxi- 
mately 16000 feet, while in a few limited areas they spill over the rim of the inter- 
andine basin down the eastern slope to about S000 feet. We found them on the 
western slope at only one point, a small lake near Casapalea, hanging on the 
precipitous rim of the divide. Co®xtensive with the altiplane, the northern barrier 
is the great Nudo de Paseo, while southward distribution has been cut off by the 
rugged voleanic terrain along the headwaters of the Pilecomayo, and the Rio Grande 
of Bolivia. At one point at least the genus has been hemmed off by a complete 
ring of active and extinct volcanoes and exists in a land-locked terrain (LL. Ascotan 
of Chile) cut off from another land-locked system (the Uyuni basin); the latter 
in turn is hemmed off by low mountains and deserts from the third land-locked 
system (the Titicaca basin), yet through all these metamorphoses of the land the 
Orestias have held their own in all three basins. 
The student of the genus Orestias is confronted not only with imadequate 
descriptions, but with poor and often misleading figures. 
All Valenciennes figures give a very erroneous conception of the mouth. The 
fins are inaccurate, the arrangement of scale-rows mechanical. Pentlandi, e.g., 
is shown as having definite rows of scales, equally with other species, while in fact 
they are rounded and irregular throughout the length, where other species have 
this irregularity upon the forward parts at most. In none does his artist show the 
scalation of the caudal base, vertical, broken series such as all species have. No 
Orestias is fully scaled below, yet three of his figures could be so understood. He 
describes O. albus as always with exposed areas alongside the back, but these areas 
are figured with scales, and as a matter of fact they often are scaled. His O. 
agassizvi fairly well shows the appearance of a young specimen, but in no Orestias, 
young or adult, is the armor of thickened scales completed so far back. This caused 
later writers to confuse it with jussiev. 
Castelnau’s three figures are a much brighter green than any member of the 
genus, in which all greens are “‘olivaceous.”’ He says the eye of O. tschudii is smaller 
and more ventral, but shows it like jussze7 in his figure. His fins are untrue to life, 
and like Valenciennes, insists on having the scale-rows of pentlandi quite regular. 
Deep-sea fishes are often brought to the top with the viscera everted under 
