KX PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
animals. Since the publication of the celebrated work of M. 
de Lacépeéde, the accession to our Museum of a great number 
of fishes, has enabled me to add several subdivisions to those of 
that learned naturalist, to form different combinations of several 
species, and to multiply anatomical observations. I have also 
had better means of verifying the species of Commerson and of 
some other travellers, and on this point I owe much toa re- 
view of the drawings of Commerson and of the dried fishes 
he brought with him, by M. Dumeril, which have been but 
very lately recovered: resources to which I added those pre- 
sented to me in the fishes brought by Peron from the Indian 
Ocean and Archipelago; those which I collected in the Medi- 
terranean, and the collections made on the coast of Coroman- 
del by the late M. Sonnerat, at the Isle of France by M. Ma- 
thieu, in the Nile and Red Sea by M. Geoffroy, &c. I was 
thus enabled to verify most of the species of Bloch, Russel, 
and others, and to have prepared the skeletons and viscera of 
nearly all the subgenera, so that this portion of the work will, 
I presume, present to icthyologists much that is new. 
As to my division of this class, I confess its inconvenience, 
but I still think it more natural than any preceding one. When 
I first published it, I gave it, quantum valeat, and if any one 
discovers a better principle of division, and as conformable 
to the organization, I shall hasten to adopt it. 
It is well known that all the works, on the general division 
of the Invertebrated animals, are mere modifications of what 
I proposed in 1795 in the first of my memoirs; and the time 
and care I have devoted to the anatomy of the Mollusca in ge- 
neral, and principally to the naked Mollusca, are equally so. 
The determining of this class, as well as of its divisions and 
subdivisions, rests on my observations; the magnificent work 
of M. Poli had alone anticipated me by descriptions and 
anatomical researches, useful to me it is true, but confined to 
bivalves and multivalves only. I have verified all the facts 
furnished to me by that able anatomist, and I have, I think, 
more justly marked the functions of some organs. I have also 
endeavoured to determine the animals to which the principal 
