DEC 25 1899 
DEEP SEA FISHES. 
GENERAL DISCUSSION. 
Tue collection upon which this report is based was made during 
February, March, and April, 1891, by the steamer “Albatross” of the 
United States Fish Commission in that part of the Pacific Ocean lying 
east of the Galapagos Archipelago, and of a line from it to the peninsula 
of Lower California. The area traversed is bounded on the east by the 
coasts of Mexico and of Central America; it is long and narrow, but by 
extending obliquely across the meridians and the parallels it reaches 
through thirty-five degrees of longitude and twenty-nine degrees of lati- 
tude, from 77° to 112° west longitude and from 1° south latitude to 28° 
north. The section is small in comparison with the entire extent of the 
Pacific, yet the importance of the material collected is greatly enhanced 
by the position of the locality, by the fact that much the larger portion 
of the dredging and trawling was done close to the equator, in the Gulf 
of Panama and immediately to the westward. More than twelve hundred 
specimens of fishes were secured; many of these were shoal water forms, 
nearly all of which belonged to species described by Jenyns, Giinther, 
Steindachner, Jordan, Gilbert and others, and having only an indirect pres- 
ent interest. About nine hundred of the specimens belong to the greater 
depths; they represent thirty-three families, a hundred genera, or about 
a hundred and eighty species hardly more than fifteen per cent of which 
have been heretofore described. The depths at which the bathybial fishes 
were taken range from a hundred fathoms downward; the greatest depth, 
2252 fathoms, occurred west of Costa Rica on a line from Culpepper Island 
to Acapulco, Mexico, and the nearest approaches to this were found off 
the Gulf of Panama about midway to the Galapagos in 1823 and 1877 
fathoms. 
