2320 The Zoologist— October, 1870. 



the secret recesses. Numbers of pretty hoopoes are flitting about in 

 their peculiar jaunty manner, raising and depressing their crests, and 

 archly coquetting with one another. Large kites and hawks, of which 

 I have observed two species, sail, poised on outspread wings, high 

 above the island ; linnets utter their short pleasing notes as they rise 

 in clouds; and a quail is shot in the high grass at the summit." — 

 P. 99. 



The 'Zoologist' used to be celebrated for its advocacy of the sea- 

 serpent, and elicited a vast amount of learned reasoning to show that 

 such things could not be. Mr. Adams adds his contribution on the 

 same side, and shows us that he was actually on the point of shooting 

 with a revolver the root of a tree "gnarled and twisted and secured to 

 the moorings of a fishing-net." Thus did Mr. Rigby frequently prove 

 political events had not occurred ; and thus even while I am writing 

 does a sagacious politician establish in the most satisfactory manner 

 that the Secret Treaty was a hoax because not written in that English- 

 school-girl French to which he was accustomed ; and thus in a vein 

 of exquisite satire did Archbishop Whateley raise historic doubts of 

 the existence of the first Napoleon ; but if we have no saurians in the 

 ocean we have certainly fishes which may reasonably be mistaken for 

 them, as we shall see. 



" Any particulars concerning ophioid fishes will I am sure be 

 welcome; and have I not a right to speak about snake-fishes? Did 

 1 not capture, in the middle of the South Atlantic, a fish which if it 

 had measured fourteen feet instead of fourteen inches, would have 

 created far more astonishment than the Regalecus Jouesii of Newman ? 

 My fish, Nemichthys scolopacea of Richardson, taken in the towing- 

 net, and even now without a place in the ichthyological system, much 

 more resembled a sea-serpent than Regalecus. It was scaleless, and 

 had sharp pointed teeth, inclined backwards like those of a serpent. 

 The body was ophioid and spotted on the sides ; the eye was large 

 and conspicuous; the jaws were very long, the gape was wide; and 

 the back was furnished with a series of rays which extended, crest- 

 like, from the nape to the end of the tail, which had no caudal fin." — 

 P. 103. 



This portrait will surely convince the most sceptical reader that, 

 amongst the untold monsters of the ocean, fishes may exist that so 

 closely resemble serpents that a seaman, who does not profess to be a 



