498 Cavailas and Pampanos 
distinguishing characteristic is a broad, dark collar over the 
neck, irom which two black stripes or straps, parting on the 
shoulders, extend, one on each side, to the tail. He looks as 
if harnessed with a pair of traces, and his behavior on a fly-rod 
is that of a wild horse. The first one that I struck, in the 
brackish water of Hillsborough River at Tampa, gave me a 
hitherto unknown sensation. The tremendous rush was not 
unfamiliar, but when the fierce fellow took the top of the water 
and went along lashing it with his tail, swift as a bullet, then 
descended, and with a short, sharp, electric shock left the line 
to come home free, I was for an instant confounded. It was 
all over in ten seconds. Nearly every fish that I struck after 
this behaved in the same way, and after I had got ‘the hang 
of them’ I took a great many.” 
The Butter-fishes: Stromateide.— The butter-fishes (Stroma- 
teide) form a large group of small fishes with short, compressed 
bodies, smooth scales, feeble spines, the vertebra in increased 
number and especially characterized by the presence of a series 
of tooth-like processes in the oesophagus behind the pharyn- 
geals. The ventral fins present in the young are often lost in 
the process of development. 
According to Mr. Regan, the pelvic bones are very loosely 
attached to the shoulder-girdle as in the extinct genera Platy- 
cormus and Homosoma. This is perhaps a primitive feature, 
indicating the line of descent of these fishes from berycoid 
forms. 
We unite with the Stromateide the groups or families of 
Centrolophide and Nomeide, knowing no characters by which 
to separate them. 
Stromateus fiatola, the fiatola of the Italian fishermen, is an 
excellent food-fish of the Mediterranean. Poronotus triacan- 
thus, the harvest-fish, or dollar-fish, of our Atlantic coast, is a 
common little silvery fish six to ten inches, as bright and almost 
as round as a dollar. Its tender oily flesh has an excellent 
flavor. Verysimilar to it is the poppy-fish (Palometa simillima) 
of the sandy shores of California, miscalled the ‘California 
pampano,” valued by the San Francisco epicure, who pays 
large prices for it supposing it to be pampano, although admit- 
ting that the pampano in New Orleans has firmer flesh and 
i] 
