32 Mr. Bennett's Observatiuns on Fishes 



the Zoological Society by John Frembly, Esq., R. N., who accompanied 

 the late expedition to the Pacific Ocean, under the command of Lord 

 Byron. They are from the coasts of the Sandwich Islands, and appear, 

 so far as I have been enabled to ascertain, to be altogether new to 

 science. No traces of them are to be found in the works of systematic 

 writers, nor are they noticed by the recent travellers, whose zoological 

 appendices I have had opportunities of consulting. It seems indeed sin- 

 gular that MM. Quoy and Gaimard, who collected on the shores of these 

 islands many species of fishes, should have brought home with them not 

 one of those which were obtained there by Mr. Frembly ; and that he, 

 on the other hand, should also have failed to meet with even a single one 

 which had been described by the travellers who so immediately pre- 

 ceded him. 



The zoological value of the collection rests almost entirely on the 

 novelty of the species contained in it. It possesses no forms strikingly 

 distinguished from those already known to us, and it is perhaps only in 

 the two species of Julis, Cuv., that there occurs a variation from the usual 

 characters sufficiently marked to induce us to suspect that they may con- 

 stitute a new section of a genus. The two species of Cirrhites, La Cep., 

 are interesting, as forming a considerable addition to a group of which 

 only an equal number had previously been figured and described, al- 

 though M. Cuvier has stated his acquaintance with several others. The 

 first of the Acanthuri, La Cep., has also .some claims to particular atten- 

 tion, on account of the peculiarity of its form produced by the great 

 expansion of its fins: and the second of them will also be noticed as 

 deviating from the type of the genus, and appearing to unite, in one of 

 its characters, the Acanthuri with the Aspisuri. 



There is, however, another point of view in which the collection pos- 

 sesses a very peculiar attraction : the probability that the fishes composing 

 it, though natives of the ocean, actually become naturalized in fresh, or 

 nearly fresh, water ; and are thus preserved and improved for the use of 

 man. It is not a little extraordinary that a fact of so much importance to 

 the comforts, and even the necessities, of life, should have been brought 

 but recently under the notice of the civilized people of Europe, while to 

 the uncultivated inhabitant of the Sandwich Islands it has probably been 

 long and practically known. Much of the subsistence of this half amphi- 



