Dr. Bancroft on the Sea-Devil of Jamaica, 445 



considered as one of the very highest) has expressed his opinion, that the 

 second and the third of these " are probably individuals of the Giorna 

 " species that have been mutilated;" and he considers the accounts of 

 the two last " as not resting upon authentic documents," (Regne Animal, 

 Vol. II. p. 138), while the respectable writer of the article Raia in Rees's 

 Cyclopoedia, from similar impressions, has abstained from noticing any of 

 the five Rays just mentioned, although, with some inconsistency, a figure 

 of Raia diabolus (the name assigned by Dr. Shaw in his General Zoology 

 to R. Mobular) has, without any further particulars, been introduced 

 into the 6th plate of the order Chondropterygii of that work; which figure, 

 from whomsoever it may have been copied, is faulty in many material res- 

 pects, if it was intended to represent the Sea-Devil of these waters, as its 

 name seems to imply.* Nor has the account which Dr. Brown has given of 

 this animal at page 457 of his Natural History of Jamaica, (obviously without 

 having ever seen it,) done otherwise than increase that obscurity; for, be- 

 ing probably misled by the Lophius piscatorius having been called by 

 many persons in England, France and Holland the Sea Devil, and also 

 perhaps by the circumstance of two small species of Lophius being found 

 in these waters, he has described our Sea Devil as another species, of that 

 genus under the name of " Lophius maximus Monoceros;" thus placing it 

 not only under a very different genus, but a very different order also, from 

 that to which it really belongs. It is probably under the new genus which 

 has been separated from that of Raia by Duraeril, and named Cephalop- 

 terus (winged head), that the Sea-Devil ought to be placed. According to 

 Cuvier (who it is to be presumed had not seen the type of this genus) the 

 two processes, or wings, on the head are merely " productions of the pecto- 

 " ral fins, which," says he (1. c. ) " instead of embracing the head, prolong 

 " their anterior extremities each into a salient point, giving to the fish the 



* In the figure here alluded to, the head, instead of being very bioad, and 

 depressed, is narrow, and subcylindrical, and is made besides to project a 

 great deal too much before the pectoral fins ; the anterior processes or flappers 

 are concave, instead of being flat ; the eyes which ought to stand prominently 

 on the edge of the head, are sunk into a groove ; the body behind ends in 

 an acute angle instead of a semicircle ; the dorsal fin is misplaced ; and the 

 ventral fins, as well as the spiracula behind the eyes, are wholly wanting. 



