THE BOX-FISH 255 



toughness, the rigidity and even the external appearance of 

 stamped leather, with the roughness of fine sand-paper. It 

 is a fine fish for the first efforts of the amateur taxidermist, 

 for it has ingrowing scales that cannot possibly come off, and 

 its colors are equally fast. 



All the Trigger-Fishes are habitants of tropical and sub- 

 tropical waters, and feed chiefly upon small shell-fishes 

 (mollusks) which their strong jaws and teeth enable them to 

 masticate successfully. Some of them, like the Orange File- 

 Fish, are brilliantly colored. In the tropics they are con- 

 sidered edible, but the few that exist along our Atlantic 

 coast are not ranked as food fishes. The species shown in 

 the illustration is the one most widely known along our Gulf 

 coast, and also the Atlantic coast up to the mouth of the 

 Potomac. In the Bahamas and the Bermudas, the skins of 

 Trigger-Fishes are extensively used by carpenters in place 

 of sand-paper for smoothing the surface of wood previous to 

 polishing. 



The Box-Fish, or Trunkfish, 1 is one of the curiosities 

 of the tropic seas, and of curio-shops generally. Its skin is a 

 rigid, triangular box, shaped in cross-section like an isosceles 

 triangle, and consists of large hexagonal plates of thin bone 

 joined firmly together by the regular integument. 



Of these fishes we have four species on our Atlantic and 

 Gulf coasts, and one off California. According to Dr. G. 

 Brown Goode, all the species of Box-Fishes were so thoroughly 

 and correctly studied by the fathers of natural history two 

 hundred years ago, that their classification of the group has 



1 Os-trac'i-on quad-ri-cor'nis. See illustration on page 374. 



