106 tEESIDENT's ADDKESS. 



fouucl in 2,500 fathoms in the Atlantic, 2,150 in the SoatherD, 

 and 2,900 fathoms in the Pacific. Sternoptychidse are frequently 

 brought up by the trawl, when it has come from the greatest 

 depths, but Sir Wyville Thomson remarks that fish of this family 

 certainly do not come fi^om the bottom, but are probably caught 

 in the passage of the net at some little distance below the sur- 

 face, "where there is reason to believe that there is a considerable 

 development of a peculiar pelagic Pauna." The members of this 

 "aberrant family of the Physostomi are singular and beautiful 

 fishes, distinguished by having on some part of the body ranges 

 of spots or glands producing a phosphorescent secretion. The 

 surface of the body is in most of the species devoid of scales, but 

 in. lieu of these the surface of the skin is broken up into hexagonal 

 or rectangular arese, separated from each other by dark lines, and 

 covered with silvery pigment, dashed with various shades of 

 bronze, or green, or steel blue."* The delicate and very in- 

 teresting fishes, which belong to the family Ophidiidee, descend to 

 very great depths ; in the Atlantic they have been taken in 2,500 

 fathoms, in the Southern Ocean in 1,975 fathoms, and in the 

 Pacific, besides other forms, blind species have been procured in 

 2,150 and 2,440 fathoms, and a transparent species in 2,600 

 fathoms. A valuable and elaborate memoir has just been pub- 

 lished, as the second portion of the Fmma and Flora des Golfes 

 von Neapol, by Dr. Carlo Emery on a remarkable fish of this 

 family, named Fierasfer, which spends a portion of its life living 

 parasitically within the bodies of large Holothurian Echinoderms 

 {Stichopus regalis and Solothuria tuhulosa). The Pediculati are 

 represented in the Atlantic by Ceratias uranoscopns, Murray, 

 which descends to 2,400 fathoms. The Macruridse are eminently 

 an abyssal family, and have been taken down to 1,900 fathoms 

 in the Atlantic, 1,950 in the Southern, and 2,425 in the Pacific 

 Ocean. The genus Lycodes of E,einhardt is peculiarly an Arctic 

 and Antarctic genus, of which six species were found during 

 the Norwegian JS'orth Atlantic Expeditions on smooth clayey 

 bottom in the Polar Sea at depths ranging from 260 to 1,333 

 fathoms. 



* Voyage of the ■ Challcnyer' in the North Atlantic, Vol. II., p. o. 



