178 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 
market is a species of Yellow-tail, Seriola Lalandii. Examples might be multiplied, but 
the intricacies involved by the plurality of application of the two names above quoted will 
suffice, perhaps, as an object lesson to the lay mind in demonstration of the fact that 
there is some virtue attachable to the intelligent application of technical terminology. 
King-fish, as obtained in Tasmania, the most toothsome of its race and a most 
delicious fish, would undoubtedly under any other name taste as sweet, but its fair 
title and reputation is open to serious disparagement at the hands of connoisseurs 
who, say at Sydney or at another of the Australian capitals, ordered for their feast 
the like-named fish. 
Especially must the traveller be warned against expecting, on investing in a 
so-called Colonial Salmon, Arripis salar, anything approaching the British “ King of 
fishes.” It attains to a weight of ten or twelve pounds and upwards, possesses fine, 
almost salmon-like lines, and, fished for with rod and spoon bait, will yield magnificent 
sport. Placed upon the table, however, it proves to be one of the poorest and 
coarsest of the Australian market species. A specimen of this fish, which is a 
member of the Perch family, and occurs in vast shoals throughout the southern 
Australian sea-board, is portrayed in No. 10, or the second fish from the left of the 
series of casts of Tasmanian fishes represented in Plate XXVIII. A smaller, closely 
allied species, Arripis georgianus, is much superior from a gastronomic standpoint. 
It: constitutes the so-called “Roughy” of the Melbourne market, but in Fremantle, 
Western Australia, is popularly known as Herring, and yields abundant sport to line 
fishermen throughout the year from the fine jetty of that sea-port. Large quantities 
of this fish are also kippered,-and, so treated, bear a by no means inconsiderable 
resemblance, in both aspect and flavour, to the familiar kippered Herring of English 
celebrity. 
Flat-fishes, Pleuronectide, are relatively scarce in Australia, though. there are 
some excellent Flounders, Rhombsolea monopus, Plate XX VIII., No. 8, in Tasmanian and 
Victorian waters, and Soles, Plagusia or Synaptura, that are distributed throughout 
the coast-line. None of these latter forms, however, occur of sufficient size or in 
sufficient abundance to constitute an important item in the colonial fish markets. A 
few years since the writer discovered in the estuary of the Endeavour river, North 
Queensland, the presence of a larger member of this family group than had been 
hitherto recorded from Australian waters. This was the Psettodes erumei of the Red 
and Indian Seas, a form attaining to a weight of several pounds, and so much 
resembling the Halibut, Hippoglossus vulgaris, of the North Atlantic, that it has been 
