178 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 



market is a species of Yellow-tail, Seriola Lalandii. Examples might be multiplied, but 

 the intricacies involved by the plurality of application of the two names above quoted will 

 suffice, perhaps, as an object lesson to the lay mind in demonstration of the fact that 

 there is some virtue attachable to the intelligent application of technical terminology. 

 King-fish, as obtained in Tasmania, the most toothsome of its race and a most 

 delicious fish, would undoubtedly under any other name taste as sweet, but its fail- 

 title and reputation is open to serious disparagement at the hands of connoisseurs 

 who, say at Sydney or at another of the Australian capitals, ordered for their feast 

 the like-named fish. 



Especially must the traveller be warned against expecting, on investing in a 

 so-called Colonial Salmon, Arripis solar, anything approaching the British " King of 

 fishes." It attains to a weight of ten or twelve pounds and upwards, possesses fine, 

 almost salmon-like lines, and, fished for with rod and spoon bait, will yield magnificent 

 sport. Placed upon the table, however, it proves to be one of the poorest and 

 coarsest of the Australian market species. A specimen of this fish, which is a 

 member of the Perch family, and occurs in vast shoals throughout the southern 

 Australian sea-board, is portrayed in No. 10, or the second fish from the left of the 

 series of casts of Tasmanian fishes represented in Plate XXVIII. A smaller, closely 

 allied species, Arripis georgianus, is much superior from a gastronomic standpoint. 

 It constitutes the so-called "Eoughy" of the Melbourne market, but in Fremantle, 

 Western Australia, is popularly known as Herring, and yields abundant sport to line 

 fishermen throughout the year from the fine jetty of that sea-port. Large quantities 

 of this fish are also kippered, and, so treated, bear a by no means inconsiderable 

 resemblance, in both aspect and flavour, to the familiar kippered Herring of English 

 celebrity. 



Flat-fishes, Pleuronectidte, are relatively scarce in Australia, though there are 

 some excellent Flounders, Rhombsolea monopus, Plate XXVIII., No. 8, in Tasmanian and 

 Victorian waters, and Soles, Plagusia or Synaptura, that are distributed throughout 

 the coast-line. None of these latter forms, however, occur of sufficient size or in 

 sufficient abundance to constitute an important item in the colonial fish markets. A 

 few years since the writer discovered in the estuary of the Endeavour river, North 

 Queensland, the presence of a larger member of this family group than had been 

 hitherto recorded from Australian waters. This was the Psettodes erumei of the Red 

 and Indian Seas, a form attaining to a weight of several pounds, and so much 

 resembling the Halibut, Hippoglotevs vulgaris, of the North Atlantic, that it has been 



