DEEP SEA FISHES. 



GENERAL DISCUSSION. 



The collection upon -which this report is based was made durino- 

 February, March, and April, 1891, by the steamer "Albatross" of the 

 United States Fish Commission in that part of the Pacific Ocean lying 

 east of the Galapagos Archipelago, and of a line from it to the peninsula 

 of Lower California. The area traversed is bounded on the east by tlie 

 coasts of Mexico and of Central America; it is long and narrow, but by 

 extending obliquely across the meridians and the parallels it reaches 

 through thirty-five degrees of longitude and twenty-nine degrees of lati- 

 tude, from 77° to 112° west longitude and from 1' south latitude to 28' 

 north. The section is small in comparison with the entire extent of the 

 Pacific, yet the importance of the material collected is greatly enhanced 

 by the position of the locality, by the fact that much the larger portion 

 of the dredging and trawling was done close to the equator, in the Gulf 

 of Panama and immediately to the westward. More than twelve hundred 

 specimens of fishes were secured ; many of these were shoal water forms, 

 neaily all of which belonged to species described by Jenyns, Glinther, 

 Steindachner, Jordan, Gilbert and others, and having only an indirect pres- 

 ent interest. About nine hundred of the specimens belong to the greater 

 depths ; they represent thirty-three families, a hundred genera, or about 

 a hundred and eighty species hardly more than fifteen per cent of which 

 have been heretofore described. The depths at which the bathybial fishes 

 were taken range from a hundred fathoms downward; the greatest depth, 

 2232 fathoms, occuri'ed west of Costa Rica on a line from Culpepper Island 

 to Acapulco, Mexico, and the nearest approaches to this were found off 

 the Gulf of Panama about midway to the Galapagos in 1823 and 1877 

 fathoms. 



