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American Fisheries Society 263 



[Slide of a mounted sailfish.] This is a fish we have on 

 exhibition which was caught with rod and reel in Florida 

 and presented to the museum. In form you will see it 

 approaches the swordfish, from the more generalized 

 mackerel type. It has the ventral fins while in the sword- 

 fish they are lost altogether ; and the sword or spear is not 

 as much developed as in the swordfish. 



[Slide of an angler or goosefish and a skeleton of the 

 same on exhibition in the museum. ] Ordinarily the museum 

 does not exhibit fish skeletons, but we have made an excep- 

 tion in the case of the goosefish. It is mostly mouth. In 

 fact I have read somewhere that it has been called a special- 

 ized stomach subtending a large mouth. The structure of 

 this fish is so very interesting that we exhibit a skeleton 

 with the mounted specimen. 



[Slide of a 14-foot sawfish cast.] Here is a sawfish 

 taken in Florida last year which has been recently placed on 

 exhibition in the museum. 



Some little while ago we heard from one of the members 

 of the museum that he had been catching sharks on the 

 south shore of Long Island and wanted to know what kind 

 of sharks they were. He was not satisfied with the infor- 

 mation he could get from the literature, so I was sent down 

 from the museum to try and solve this problem for him. 

 It proved that he was harpooning the dusky shark {Car- 

 charhinus ohscurus. 



[Slide of a dusky shark.] Here is one we harpooned 

 that day. They come into the bay in the summer to bear 

 their young, and are quite a common shark there. This one 

 had inside it about twenty flatfishes, which it had caught on 

 the bottom, and one or two fishes of other sorts. The 

 gentleman who harpooned them said that they generally 

 contained flatfishes. 



[Slide of a sailboat with man aloft and man on bowsprit 

 balancing harpoon.] Here is the boat from which he does 

 the harpooning, and his harpoon. 



A good many collections come to the museum to be iden- 



