FISHES PHENOMENAL AND ECONOMICAL. 179 



referred to the same genus by some authorities. It is an excellent table fish, and if 

 procurable in any quantity would be a valuable addition to the Australian market 

 list. 



The fish species illustrated by two examples, No. 25, at the base and to the 

 extreme right in the series of casts figured in Plate XXVIII., is, although of small size, 

 highly esteemed for the table in Australia. This is the Gar-fish, Hemirhamphus inter- 

 medius, a slender, cylindrical type, rarely exceeding a foot in length, which occurs in 

 vast shoals throughout the temperate Australian seas. From the English Gar-fish, 

 genus Belone, of which there are also Australian representatives, it may be readily 

 distinguished by the circumstance that it is only the lower jaw, in place of both upper 

 and lower jaws, that is developed in a characteristic beak-like manner. In the lower 

 of the two figures given the small rudimentary character of the elevated upper jaw is 

 clearly shown. Over half-a-dozen Australian species of this genus Hemirhamphus 

 have been described, several of which are exclusively denizens of the tropical 

 sea-board. In an allied Australian form, Arhamphus, the beak, as the name betokens, 

 is entirely suppressed. 



The fresh waters of Australia yield some fish of more phenomenal interest than 

 the few already referred to. In Ceratodus Forsteri, the Lung Fish or Burnet and 

 Mary River Salmon, of the Queensland colonists, is presented the only known surviving 

 member of a genus which, with numerous allies, was abundantly represented in the 

 Triassic and Jurassic formations of Europe, India, and America. Of its peculiar 

 sub-order the Dipnoi or lung-breathing fishes Lepidosiren paradoocus of the Amazons 

 in South America, and Protopterus annectens of tropical Africa, are again the only 

 other known living types. In common with such other large - scaled fresh-water 

 fishes as the Giant Perch, Lates calcarifer and Osteoglossum Leichardti, Ceratodus 

 Forsteri is commonly associated by the Queensland natives with the name of the 

 " Barramundi." This title, in its restricted sense, is now, however, exclusively attached 

 to Osteoglossum. 



This last-named form is almost as remarkable as is Ceratodus, with reference 

 to the present geographical distribution of its nearest allies. A second species, 

 Osteoglossum Jardinei, has been recorded by the writer from North Queensland ; 

 otherwise, the only known additional specific forms of the same genus, Osteoglossum 

 Iricirrhosum and O. formosum, are inhabitants respectively of the fresh-water rivers of 

 Brazil, and of Borneo and Sumatra, while two allied genera Arapaima and Heterotis 

 are indigenous, like the previously recorded Dipnoi, to the rivers of tropical South 



