HISTORY. y 



men knew the fishes of the Continent, especially those of 

 Germany, better than any other Continental zoologist. 



By the definition of fishes as animals with blood, breath- 

 ing by gills, provided with a single ventricle of the heart, 

 covered with scales or naked ; the Cetaceans are excluded. 

 Yet, at a later period Eay appears to have been afraid of so 

 great an innovation as the separation of whales from fishes, 

 and, therefore, he invented a definition of fisl) which com- 

 prises both. The fishes proper are then arranged in the 

 first place according to the cartilaginous or osseous nature of 

 the skeleton ; further subdivisions being formed with regard 

 to the general form of the body, the presence or absence of 

 ventral fins, the soft or spinous structure of the dorsal rays, 

 the number of dorsal fins, etc. Not less than 420 species are 

 thus arranged and described, of which about 180 were known 

 to the authors from autopsy : a comparatively small propor- 

 tion, descriptions and figures still forming at that time in a 

 great measure a substitute for collections and museums. 

 With the increasing accumulation of forms the want of a 

 fixed nomenclature is now more and more felt. 



Peter Artedi would have been a great ichthyologist if P. Artedi. 

 Eay or Willughby had never preceded him. But he was 

 fully conscious of the fact that both had prepared the way 

 for him, and therefore he derived all possible advantages from 

 their works. Born in 1705 in Sweden, he studied with Lin- 

 nseus at Upsala; from an early period he devoted himself 

 entirely to the study of fishes, and was engaged in the 

 arrangement and description of the ichthyological collection of 

 Seba, a wealthy Dutchman who had formed the then perhaps 

 richest museum, when he was accidentally drowned in one of 

 the canals of Amsterdam in the year 1734, at an age of twenty- 

 nine years. His manuscripts were fortunately rescued by an 

 Englishman, Cliffort, and edited by his early friend Linnaeus. 



