'ANGEL FISH SAWFISHES 2911 



and the pectoral fins are large and continued anteriorly toward the head. The 

 teeth, which generally have large roots, are compressed from front to back, with the 

 crown more or less bent backward, and either with a sharp cutting edge, or very 

 blunt. In the mouth they were arranged in straight rows to form a pavement. 



THE ANGEI, FISH Family 



The sole existing representative of its family, the angel fish or monkfish 

 {Squatina vulgaris} constitutes, so far as external form is concerned, a kind of 

 connecting link between the sharks and the rays. Having the body as much 

 depressed as in some of the latter, the angel fish differs in the nearly terminal 

 position of the mouth, and also in the circumstance that while the basal portion of 

 the pectoral fins is much produced forward, it does not extend so far as to join the 

 head. The wide gill clefts are lateral in position, and partly covered by the base of 

 the pectoral fins; the spiracles are wide and placed behind the eyes; and the teeth 

 conical and pointed. Spines are wanting to the dorsal fins, which are situated on 

 the tail; and the skin is studded with tubercles. Not unfrequently growing to a 

 length of at least five feet, the angel fish has an almost cosmopolitan distribution, 

 and is by no means uncommon on the British coasts, more especially in Scotland. 

 In color it is mottled chocolate brown above, and whitish beneath, and except that 

 it produces living young, which may number as many as twenty at a birth, its gen- 

 eral habits are similar to those of the rays. Fossil species of angel fish range 

 through the Tertiary and Cretaceous strata to the upper Jurassic. 



THE SAWFISHES Families PRISTIOPHORID^, and 



Unique among the whole class on account of the production of the upper jaw 

 into a long flattened beak, furnished on either edge with a series of large, sharp, 

 and pointed teeth, set in distinct sockets at a considerable distance from one an- 

 other, the sawfishes form two well-defined families, the first of which approximates 

 to the sharks in the position of the gill clefts, while the second agrees with the rays 

 in the same particular. Each contains but a single existing genus, and the first is 

 unknown previous to the present epoch. 



The four species belonging to the first family, one of which (Pristio- 

 Side-Gilled . . . . . 



Sawfishes P' wrus japonicus) is shown in the illustration, are comparatively 



small fishes confined to the Japanese and Australian seas. Having 

 the body scarcely depressed, and the pectoral fins of moderate dimensions, and not 

 extending forward to the head, these sawfishes are distinguished by the lateral 

 position of the gill clefts, and full development of the so-called prepalatine cartilage, 

 and the presence of a pair of long tentacles on the lower aspect of the jaw. In 

 habits these fishes probably resemble those of the next genus. 



Distributed over all the warmer seas, the members of this genus, among which 

 Pristis antiquorum of the Mediterranean and Atlantic is most commonly met with, 

 differ from the last, not only in the inferior position of the gill clefts, but likewise 



