THE ROSE-FISH AND ITS ALLIES. 259 
off-shore banks north of Cape Cod, where it attains its greatest size. A 
specimen, brought in by one of the Gloucester halibut schooners, was 
about two feet in length and weighed about fourteen pounds. Along the 
Maine coast they are much smaller than this, rarely exceeding eight or ten 
inches and the weight of twelve ounces, though occasionally growing to 
the weight of one and a half pounds. 
In Scandinavia there have been recognized two species; one, a large, 
orange-colored form, inhabiting deep water, known to the Norwegians as 
the ‘‘ Red-fish ’’ (Reed-fisk), and considered to be S. marinus (S. norwe- 
gicus); the other, a smaller species of much deeper color, called the 
‘‘Lysanger,’’ and described by Kroyer under the name ‘‘S. vzviparus,’’ 
and by Ekstrém as ‘‘.S. regudus.’’ After the most careful study of all the 
specimens in the National Museum, we have been unable to recognize 
more than one species on our coast, and recent Norwegian ichthyologists, 
among them especially Mr. Robert Collett, believe that the two Norwegian 
forms are not actually distinct species, but that the smaller one is simply 
a pigmy race which is especially adapted to live in the long, shallow fiords 
of that region. Dr. Liitken, always conservative, is inclined to. believe 
the two forms distinct, regarding the large fish of the deep water as the 
primitive type from which the smaller littoral form has been derived by 
development. According to the last mentioned authority, the two forms 
have very different geographical distribution, S. wzparus inhabiting the 
shallows in the vicinity of the Faroe Islands, Southern Sweden, Norway, 
and New England, but unknown to Great Britain, Denmark, Finmark, 
Iceland, and Greenland; while S. marinus is found in Greenland and 
Iceland and all the length of the Norwegian coast, in Spitzbergen, Baren 
Island, on the coasts of Denmark, and occasionally in the north of 
England and Ireland. Possibly, he suggests, it inhabits the deep waters 
at a distance from shore, off the Faroe Islands and North America, but 
that is not yet certainly known. S. wzvifarus, then, he declares, is a 
form less arctic as well as more littoral. 
This subject is here referred to in the hope that additional observations 
may be drawn out tending to settle the question whether or not there 
are two forms of Sedastes on the American coast. It seems, however, 
improbable, since the physical conditions are so different from those under 
which they occur on the other side of the Atlantic. 
The food of the Rose-fish consists, like that of its cousins, the sculpins, 
