ON THE ANATOMY OF A.MPIIIOXUS LANCEOLATUS. 373 



mouth, the armed lingual bone, the absence of eyes, and the 

 want of pectoral and ventral fins, to be structural characters 

 sufficient to connect it with the Lamprey and Myxine. For 

 its receptiou he constituted a new genus, Amphioxus, and 

 described the species under the designation lanccolatus, looking 

 upon it as the lowest in organisation in the class of fishes.* 



Mr. Couch, the indefatigable ichthyologist of Polperro, 

 who supplied Mr. Yarrell with his specimen, published in the 

 Magazine of Natural History, July 1838, a short paper, in 

 which he gave some additional details of structure observed 

 before the animal had been immersed in spirits. He con- 

 sidered it to be a fish with sixty vertebrae. He observed the 

 anal fin, which had escaped Mr. Yarrell in the preserved 

 specimen ; he also described what he considered an anomalous 

 kind of fin rays, in the form of transverse bows or arches, the 

 curve forming the support of the fin, the pillars probably resting 

 on transverse spinous processes of the vertebra:. He observed 

 that these peculiar rays did not extend to the caudal portion of 

 either the dorsal or anal fins. In his second specimen, on 

 which the observations of structure were made, he could detect 

 none of the ova which were so conspicuous in the first. 



I was not aware till I had almost finished my examination 

 of the Lancelet, that anything further had been published on 

 the subject. A few weeks ago, however, I observed in the 

 proceedings of the Berlin Academy for 1839, an abstract of 

 a paper on Amphioxus lanceolatus by Professor Miillcr. 

 Prom this abstract it appears that Professor Eetzius of Stock- 

 holm has written a short memoir on the subject, in which he 

 lias announced the fact, observed by himself and Professor 

 Sandevall, that the chorda dorsalis does not pass into a 

 cranium, but terminates at a point behind it. Professor 



* Yarrell' British Fishes, loc. eit 



t Berichl iiber 'li'' zur Bekarm tmachung geeigneten Verhandlungen der 

 gl. Preufla Akademie dei Wissen chafl ! Berlin. Nov. 1889, p. l!>7 



