386 EXPLORATIONS ACROSS THE GREAT BASIN OF UTAH. 



Subclass TELEOSTEI, Muller. 



Order TELEOCEPHALI, Gill. 

 Suborder PHYSOCLYSTI, (Bon.) Gill. 



Family PERCOID^, (Cuv.) Gill. 

 Subfamily LABRACIKE, Gill. 



There is found in the Mediterranean Sea a fish which lias, from the earliest times, 

 attracted the attention of the inhabitants of the neighboring coasts from the abundance 

 in which it is found and the size to which it attains. By the ancients, as at the present 

 day, it was much esteemed as an article of food, and was called by the Greeks XdfipaP^ 

 and by the Romans lupus. Of this fish, Cuvier has said (but scarcely with strict cor- 

 rectness) that its appearance and almost all the details of its form recall to mind the 

 perch, and that a just idea would be given of it by describing it as a " large, elongated, 

 and silvery perch ". 



From the Perches, however, it differs in several characters, Avhich induced Cuvier 

 to separate it generically, and for the name of the genus he adopted the Greek desig- 

 nation of the species. The characters by which Cuvier distinguished it from the 

 Perches were the presence of teeth on the tongue and of two spines to the operculum. 

 It differs also from the true Perches in the armature of some of its bones and by the 

 shorter spinous dorsal fin, the rays in the European and allied American species being 

 always nine, and still more by modifications of the skeleton and among others the small 

 number of vertebra, of which there are 11 or 12 abdominal and 13 or 14 caudal. The 

 very distinct type represented by Labrax Japonicus Cuv. and Val. {—LateolahraxJaponkiis 

 Bleeker) has, however, 16 abdominal and 19 caudal vertebra?. 



Though Cuvier was the first to properly distinguish the genus, its type had been 

 long previously recorded by Klein as the first of two species, which he placed in a 

 group, for which he used the same name Labrax. 



That author, in his fifth and last Missal for the Advancement of the Natural His- 

 tory of Fishes,* has devoted his ninth fasciculus to the consideration and description 

 of those fishes provided with two dorsal fins. In this group he includes the Trouts 

 {Trutta Klein), in which the first dorsal is sustained by branched rays while the 

 second is adipose, as well as Mullus, Cestrmus Klein, Labrax Klein, Sphyrmna, Golio 

 Klein, Aspendus Klein, and Trichidion Klein, in which the first dorsal is spinous and 

 the second has branched rays. Trutta of Klein is synonymous with the extended 

 genus Salmo of Linmeus ; Mullus embraces, like the Linna?an genus, the Mulli and 

 the Amias of Gronovius, or Apogons of Lacepede ; the Cestrm are the Mugiles of Lin- 

 ngeus ; Sphyrmna is limited to the true species of the genus as now accepted ; Golio 



