19003 At Matsushima 



one bearing a few long-armed pine trees, often fan- 

 tastically shaped, the whole combining to form a 

 scene of truly unusual beauty. 



Not far from the town is a somewhat noted quarry 

 of hard fossil wood — carbonized to a rich black — 

 from which they make handsome, heavy, highly 

 polished trays etched with charming views of the 

 '^pine islands." On the thickly wooded promontory Thrifty 

 to the north, monkeys still lived, I was told, coming ^°^^^y^ 

 down at low tide to gather edible seaweed — Porphyra 

 — for their winter store. 



In Matsushima Bay, remote as it is from the Kuro 

 Shio, we began to get distinctive northern forms, 

 several of them new and of special interest. As 

 already stated, the fishes of the cold waters of Japan 

 had leceived no attention from ichthyologists, only 

 a few scattering notices, mostly derived from Perry's 

 expedition, having been published. In the south, 

 on the contrary, the larger fishes, especially those 

 used for food, had long been fairly well-known to 

 science. For in the '40's, when the Dutch were the 

 only Westerners privileged to enter Japan, Dr. Karl 

 Th. von Siebold of Leiden sent over a capable natu- 

 ralist named Burger, who gathered much material 

 at Nagasaki and elsewhere in Kyushyu. Upon this 

 collection was based a finely illustrated volume of 

 the *' Fauna Japonica" by Coenrad J. Temminck ''Fauna 

 and Herrmann Schlegel. Later, in the '70's and '8o's, -^""^ 

 two successive foreign professors of Zoology in the 

 Imperial University of Tokyo, Franz Hilgendorf of 

 Berlin and Ludwig Doderlein of Vienna, published 

 careful studies of the species found in the Tokyo 

 markets, the most important being the joint work 

 of Steindachner and Doderlein. But the vast array 



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