358 Zoological N. Y. Zoological Society. [1;19 



We next hear of our great shark in a letter sent from Dr. 

 Buist in Bombay, to Colonel Sykes in London and published in 

 Proceedings Zoological Society of London, 1850. Dr. Buist' in 

 describing shark fishing at Kurrachee in Northwest India, west 

 of the mouth of the Indus River, speaks of the capture of the 

 "Great Basking Shark or Mhor," a giant shark ''often 40, and 

 sometimes 60 feet in length." Here the spots are not mentioned, 

 but, as there is no record of Selache maximus being found in the 

 Indian Ocean, we must conclude that Rhineodon is referred to. 

 So think most of the writers on this fish. 



Our next reference, however, is to a gigantic shark so well 

 described that there can be no doubt as to its identity. Captain 

 James Steuart in his "Notes on Ceylon," (1862), page 156, says: 

 "Sharks of the ordinary description are frequently seen ; and on 

 two occasions my attention has been called to spotted ones of 

 such monstrous size as to make the common ones at their sides 

 appear like pilot-fish."' 



The next describer of the Whale Shark is August Dumeril 

 (1865), who, however, had only the skin of the Table Bay speci- 

 men and Smith's descriptions to work upon. He gives a very 

 clear and comprehensive description, but adds nothing to our 

 knowledge save in the matter of teeth, which will be considered 

 later. 



In 1865, Doctor Theodore Gill described from the Gulf of 

 California a spotted Whale Shark which, misled by Smith's de- 

 scription and Mtiller and Henle's erroneous figure of the teeth, 

 he differentiated from the genus Rhineodon, while retaining it 

 in the family Rhineodontidse, under the name Micristodus punc- 

 tatus. His statement (omitting the description of the teeth 

 to be given later) is as follows: 



"In the year 1858 the Smithsonian Institution received, 

 from Captain Stone, the jaws and vertebrae of an enormous 

 species of shark existing in the Gulf of California and known 

 to the inhabitants of the neighboring regions as the 'Tiburon 

 Ballenas,' or 'Whale Shark.' The specimen represented by the 



'Doctor Buist's information came from a correspondent at Kurrachee. 



^Fov a copy of this extract from Steuart I am indebted to the kind- 

 ness of Mr. C. Tate Regan. 



