ICHTHYOLOGIC WORK 33 



that, while a guest of the great ornithologist, he was 

 victimized in a most cruel and reprehensible manner, 

 incidents occurring which, in after years, were said 

 to have been but a practical joke. Audubon's facile 

 pencil and vivid imagination conspired together to 

 produce drawings of fishes, said to dwell in the Ohio, 

 which were nothing if not wonderful. With a suave 

 manner and with an air of absolute truthfulness, 

 these drawings were shown to Rafinesque, and the 

 size and beauty of their living prototypes proclaimed. 

 With a hesitation that is painfully evident, in some 

 cases at least, Rafinesque yielded to his penchant for 

 framing new genera and describing new species, — 

 the bane of later gifted writers, by the way, — and 

 gave these grotesque forms a name and place in the 

 ichthyologic system. Time, valuable time, has been 

 lost in the vain attempt to find and properly place 

 these mythical forms. That the names thus bestowed 

 .should be dropped goes without saying, but there 

 are those who, knowing the facts in these cases, 

 would yet insist upon relegating all the names pro- 

 posed by Rafinesque to the limbo of synonymy. It 

 would be better to drop these names without preju- 

 dice; following this, the strict rules of priority, as 

 enforced by the fair-minded man of science, will 

 eventually determine the place of the remainder.* 



There have been two almost insuperable difficul- 

 ties encountered in attempting to correlate Rafi- 

 nesque 's species with those recognized at the present 



*The fishes which Rafinesque thus described on the authority of 

 Audubon are the following: Perca nigropunctata, Aplocentrus 

 calliops, Pogostoma leucops, Catostomus anisopturus, Catostomus 

 niger, Catostomus fasciolaris, Catostomus (?) megastomus, Pylo- 

 dictis limosus, Accipenser macrostomus, Dinectes truncatus. 



