1835.] Notice of an Extraordinary Fish. 221 



least, only the fossil remains are found. Bosc, speaking of the squale 

 roussette, Squalus catulus et canicula, Linn., says of the fossil teeth, 

 *' There is in the museum of Natural History at Paris, a tooth, an inch 

 and ten lines long, and two inches nine lines broad ; which according 

 to a very moderate calculation, by Lacepe\de, must have belonged to 

 an individual fifty feet in length ! Art. Squale, and in another place he 

 says, Art. Requin," — 



" The length of the front teeth of a shark thirty feet long is about 

 two inches, and their breadth at the base two and a half ; but there is 

 shown at the Museum Nat. His. at Paris, a petrified shark's tooth, 

 found at Dax, near the Pyrenees, which is, also, exclusive of the root, 

 nearlv four inches long. The animal to which it belonged must then 

 have been more than sixty feet in length ! (Lacepe v de, from an unques- 

 tionable calculation, estimates it at seventy -one feet ! and that the 

 jaws were nine feet in diameter !") The authority of Lacepevde is so 

 high, that we may fairly conjecture the question of size to be so far set 

 at rest, that Lieut. Foley and myself will be acquitted of any 

 exaggeration ; and the fact of their swallowing boat and fishermen 

 too, is farther confirmed by Bloch, (a good authority,) who says, speak- 

 ing of the preference given by the sharks to putrid flesh, that *' the 

 Greenlanders, who frequent a sea abounding in sharks, in little canoes 

 made of the skin of this fish, are careful to make as little noise as pos- 

 sible, to avoid the chance of being swallowed together with their boat 

 by these monsters." Its colour is the next remarkable circumstance, 

 and it is worth noticing, that in this all parties agree. The dorsal 

 fin mentioned by Lieut. Foley and the lizard-like head I am una- 

 ble to speak to. It is quite possible however that there may be a 

 genus of these monsters which have the head far less flattened than 

 in general. Raja rhinobatus, which seems to connect the two genera 9 

 has the snout lengthened. 



I suspect the name chacon to be a West Indian (Carib or African) 

 one for a shark. I do not find it in any Spanish Dictionary, and I am 

 not aware that it is derived from any of the dialects of the Philippine 

 Islands. We may hope that ere long some of our whalers may meet 

 with one of these monsters, and thus enable naturalists to form some 

 judgment of what they are. It would be a highly interesting circum- 

 stance could we procure some of the teeth, and these should be found 

 to correspond with those at Paris. Perhaps some of your Singapore 

 readers may be enabled to furnish us with more information from the 

 Malay fishermen, if the Ikan Bintang is known in those seas. 



I had just finished this paper, when I received from my friend Dr. 

 Harlan, of Philadelphia, the first number of the Transactions of the 



