1076 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES. 



also describes another fish (i inch long and undoubtedly the young of the above) 

 as B. celatus. This latter he notes is frequently found in oysters, while in 1824 

 a shower of them fell in the streets of New York. De Kay gives two figures of 

 the toadfish, but they are not to be compared to Le Sueur's splendid drawing. 

 The present writer twice went over the plates of this paper without recognizing 

 either figure as that of the fish in question. One figure has the caudal fin 

 pointed, the other rounded. 



Storer (1855) in his "History of the Fishes of Massachusetts," published 

 about the middle of the last century, gives a very interesting but not wholly 

 accurate account of the nesting habits of the toadfish. As the essential points 

 in his paper will be discussed later, it will not be necessary to go further into it 

 here than to say that he was the pioneer worker on the halDits of this fish. He 

 obtained his information chiefly from Dr. William O. Ayres, of East Hartford, 

 Conn. This information must have been conveyed by letter, for in Ayres's 

 paper published thirteen years before (1842) there is a very meager account of 

 the general habits only and no reference whatever to the nesting habits. Ayres's 

 paper will be referred to later. 



Yarrow (1877) , twenty-two years after Storer, in listing the fishes of Beaufort 

 Harbor, speaks of finding a nest of toad eggs in an old boot leg. In 1881, Alex- 

 ander Agassiz, in the course of an interesting article, "On the Young Stages of 

 Some Osseous Fishes," describes the coloring of a half-grown larva and figures 

 the heterocercal tail. In a popular article published in Harper's Magazine, C. F. 

 Holder (1883) figures a toadfish in a nest amid seaweeds, and falls into the 

 popular error of making the mother the guardian. With regard to the adhesion 

 of the eggs, however, he merely says that the young are enabled to cling to the 

 rocks by their yolk sacs, remaining until bold enough to swirn away. Goode 

 (1884), in dealing with the nesting habits and embryology of the toadfish, 

 quotes Storer (1855) at length and gives the accurate and highly interesting 

 observations of Silas Stearns, of Pensacola, Fla., all of which are quoted in detail 

 further on. 



In 1886 John A. Ryder published the first of a series of short but highly 

 interesting papers on the habits and embryology of Opsanus (or, as it was 

 then called, Batrachus) tau. These papers followed in rapid succession. The 

 first appeared in 1886 and seems to have been an abstract of the but slightly 

 longer article which appeared in 1887. This latter paper, which he calls a 

 "Preliminary Notice," contains six figures, the first illustrations of toadfish 

 embryos ever published so far as the writer knows. The third, last, and pos- 

 sibly most valuable of these papers is an oral communication to the Philadel- 

 phia Academy, on November 4, 1890, on "The Functions and Histology of the 

 Yolk-Sack of the Young Toadfish." The striking points of these papers are 

 all referred to later in the body of this article. 



