Januabt 11, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



63 



papers with excellent half-tone illustrations. 

 A full index closes this most interesting 

 volume, which in the words of the editor " will 

 be a souvenir to those who know the Van- 

 couver coast and love the memories of the 

 happy days and nights under the sheltering 

 roof of the ' Sea Palms,' or beside the white 

 water." To others it will certainly justify 

 the hope that it ' will have some scientific and 

 permanent value.' Charles E. Bessey 



The UjsrrvEEsiTY of Nebraska 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES 



THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON 



The 419th meeting was held on November 

 3, 1906, President EJQOwlton in the chair and 

 twenty-seven persons present. 



Dr. Theo. N. Gill presented the first paper 

 of the meeting, on ' The Work of Pterophryne 

 and the Plying-Pishes.' The combination of 

 two such different fishes as sargasso fish, or 

 Pterophryne, and the exocoetoid flying-fishes 

 is the index of a curious history. 



In December, 1871, one of the most accom- 

 plished naturalists of the nineteenth century. 

 Professor Louis Agassiz, made a famous voy- 

 age for discovery to Brazil and while travers- 

 ing the Gulf Stream, found a globular nest- 

 like mass of sea-weed filled with eggs, which 

 he examined and noticed in a letter published 

 in the American Journal of Science. These 

 -eggs were identified as those of the sargasso 

 fish, now generally known as Pterophryne 

 histrio. In 1887 many more such masses were 

 found in the sargasso meadows off the coast of 

 Africa, and, accepting the identification by 

 Agassiz, Professor Leon Vaillant explained 

 how the Pterophryne made the nest. In 1894 

 Professor K. Mobius described still more in 

 detail the eggs and nest and likewise assumed 

 the correctness of the identification of the 

 mass as a nest made by Pterophryne. He 

 described in detail and figure the bipolar fila- 

 ments of the eggs found in connection with 

 such masses and found, by examination of the 

 ovaries of a Pterophryne, that the ovarian eggs 

 had no filaments and were smaller than the 

 eggs found in the nest-like masses. He con- 

 sequently postulated that the filaments must 

 be acquired during the passage of the eggs 



through the oviduct. Such were the opinions 

 up to last year. It was then found that 

 the Pterophryne had nothing whatever to do 

 with the nest-like masses of sargasso ! 



In the fall of 1905 Dr. Hugh Smith invited 

 the speaker to call at his ofiice and see some 

 eggs that had been laid by a Pterophryne in 

 an aquarium under his own observation. To 

 his surprise, those eggs had no filaments and 

 were smaller than those that had been de- 

 scribed by Mobius. Subsequently Dr. E. W. 

 Gudger sent him a notice of similar eggs and 

 explained that they were extruded in a long 

 jelly-like mass, in fact like that issuing from 

 an angler {Lophius piscatorius).' It became 

 evident, therefore, that the nest-like masses 

 of sargasso must be made by a very different 

 fish from the Pterophryne. The only egg-s 

 like those found in the sargasso weed are 

 those of flying-fishes. In fine, the nest-like 

 masses of sargasso are not made by any fish 

 at all, but by the eggs themselves. The eggs 

 must be laid on the fronds of the weed and 

 the long motile tendril-like filaments clasp the 

 finely cut branches of a frond tiU a globular 

 mass is brought together. As Professor 

 Agassiz had not noticed any bipolar filaments 

 on the eggs examined by him. Dr. Gill thought 

 it was possible that a lot of the eggs of a 

 Pterophryne might have drifted in a mass 

 with flying-fish eggs. The different times of 

 oviposition of the sargasso-fish and the maker 

 of the nest-like masses, it is true, were an ob- 

 jection to such a hypothesis, but it was as- 

 sumed that there might be exceptional coin- 

 cidence. To test the hypothesis. Dr. Alexander 

 Agassiz, the discoverer of the peculiar oviposi- 

 tion of the angler, sent eggs taken from out- 

 side of a nest-like mass figured by hira and 

 they proved to have the filaments character- 

 istic of flying-fishes. That hypothesis must, 

 therefore, be abandoned, and the one crediting 

 the formation of the nest-like masses to the 

 flying-flsh alone be accepted for the present 

 at least. 



Dr. Hugh M. Smith in discussing the sub- 

 ject described the spawning of Pterophryne 



'See 'A Note on the Eggs and Egg-laying of 

 Pterophryne histrio, tlie Gulf-weed Fish,' by E. 

 W. Gudger, in Sciekoe, December 22, 1905. 



