5 ~A CHECK-LIST OF THE FISHES AND FISH-LIKE VERTEBRATES 

 OF NORTH AND MIDDLE AMERICA. 



David Starr Jordan, Pii. D., 

 President of Leland Stanford Jr. Unirersify and of the California Academy of Sciences, 



AND 



Barton Warren Evermann, Ph. D., 

 Ichthyologist of the United States Fish Commission. 



PREFACE. 



The i)resent paper is a list of all the species of fishes and fish-like 

 vertebrates thus far recorded as occurring in American waters north 

 of the Isthmus of Panama. For the sake of greater completeness the 

 marine fishes of Guiana, Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands are 

 included, as all of these are sure, sooner or later, to be found within 

 our limits. In like manner the few species known from Kamchatka are 

 included as part of the fauna of the Alaskan Sea. 



The sequence and nomenclature is that of Jordan & Evermann, 

 "Fishes of North and Middle America,'.' a descriptive catalogue form- 

 ing Bulletin 47 of the United States National Museum. Of this work, 

 Volume I, BrancMostomaUdcv to Priacanthid^, is now j^rinted, but not 

 published; Volume II is still in manuscript. It is expected that both 

 will be published within the present year. The differences between 

 the nomenclature given in this check-list and that of the work in ques- 

 tion arise from the incorporation of new material into the one work 

 after the printing of the other. 



In both these memoirs, the rules of nomenclature as laid down by 

 the American Ornithologists' Union have been followed implicitlj^, with 

 two exceptions. The first of these exceptions concerns Canon XVII, 

 2, which gives to specific names applied to males precedence over 

 names used for females, when the two occur ou the same page. In 

 such cases of synchronous names we have awarded priority to the 

 name standing first on the page, regardless of other considerations. 

 The other exception is the rule abandoning a name (as Scaphirhynchus, 

 F. R. 95 14 209 



