256 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVI. No. 398. 



reticence was due not wholly to lack of 

 self-confidence, but rather to the scattered 

 condition of the literature of Japanese ich- 

 thyology. For this reason no Japanese au- 

 thor has ever felt sure that any given un- 

 determined species was really new. Other 

 Japanese ichthyologists of promise are Dr. 

 Kamakichi Kishinouye, Dr. Shinnosuke 

 Matsubara and Keinosuke Otaki, and we 

 may look for others among the pupils of 

 Dr. Kakichi Mitsukuri, the distinguished 

 Professor of Zoology in the Imperial Uni- 

 versity. 



The most recent, as well as the most ex- 

 tensive, studies of the fishes of Japan were 

 made in 1900 by the present writer and 

 his associate, John Otterbein Snyder. 



The scanty pre-Cuvieran work on the 

 fishes of North America has been already 

 noticed. Contemporary with the early 

 work of Cuvier is the worthy attempt of 

 Professor Samuel Latham Mitchell (1764- 

 1831) to record in systematic fashion the 

 fishes of New York. Soon after followed 

 the admirable work of Charles Alexander 

 Le Sueur (1780-1840), artist and natural- 

 ist, who was the first to study the fishes of 

 the Great Lakes and the basin of the Ohio. 

 Le Sueur 's engravings of fishes, in the early 

 publications of the Academy of Natural 

 Sciences in Philadelphia, are still among 

 the most satisfactory representations of the 

 species to which they refer. Constantine 

 Samuel Rafinesque (1784-1842), the third 

 of this remarkable but very dissimilar trio, 

 published numerous papers descriptive of 

 the species he had seen or heard of in his 

 various botanical rambles. This culmi- 

 nated in his elaborate but untrustworthy 

 ' Ichthyologia Ohiensis. ' The fishes of 

 Ohio received later a far more conscien- 

 tious though less brilliant treatment at the 

 hands of Dr. Jared Potter Kirtland (1793- 

 1877), an eminent physician of Cleveland, 

 Ohio. In 1842 the amiable and scholarly 

 James Ellsworth Dekay (1799-1851) pub- 



lished his detailed report on .the ' New 

 York fauna,' and a little earlier (1836) 

 in the ' Fauna Boreali- Americana ' Sir 

 Jolm Richardson (1787-1865) gave a most 

 valuable and accurate account of the fishes 

 of the Great Lakes and Canada. Almost 

 simultaneously, Rev. Zadock Thompson 

 (1796-1856) gave a catalogue of the fishes 

 of Vermont, and David Humphreys Storer 

 (1804-1891) began his work on the fishes 

 of Massachusetts, finally expanded into a 

 ' Synopsis of the Fishes of North America ' 

 ( 1846 ) and a ' History of the Fishes of 

 Massachusetts ' (1867). Dr. John Edwards 

 Holbrook (1794-1871), of Charleston, pub- 

 lished (1860) liis invaluable record of the 

 fishes of South Carolina, the promise of 

 still more important work, which was de- 

 stroyed by the outbreak of the Civil War. 

 The monogTaph on Lake Superior (1850) 

 and other publications of Louis Agassiz 

 (1807-1873) have been already noticed. 

 One of the first of Agassiz 's students was 

 Charles Girard (1822-1895), who came 

 with him from Switzerland, and, in asso- 

 ciation with Spencer Pullerton Baird 

 (1823-1887), described the fishes from the 

 United States Pacific Railway Surveys 

 ( 1858 ) and the United States and Mexican 

 Boundary Surveys (1859). Professor 

 Baird, primarily an ornithologist, became 

 occupied with executive matters, leaving 

 Girard to finish these studies of the fishes. 

 A large part of the work on fishes pub- 

 lished by the United States National Mu- 

 seum and the United States Fish Com- 

 mission has been made possible through 

 the direct help and inspiration of Pro- 

 fessor Baird. Among those engaged in this 

 work, James M. Milner, Hugh M. Smith 

 and Marshall Macdonald may be noted. 

 Most eminent, however, among the stu- 

 dents and assistants of Professor Baird 

 was his successor, George BroAvn Goode 

 (1851-1899), one of the most accomplished 

 of American naturalists, whose greatest 



