FISHES—PHENOMENAL AND ECONOMICAL. 179 
referred to the same genus by some authorities. It is an excellent table fish, and if 
procurable in any quantity would be a valuable addition to the Australian market 
list. 
The fish species illustrated by two examples, No. 25, at the base and to the 
extreme right in the series of casts figured in Plate XX VIIL., is, although of small size, 
highly esteemed for the table in Australia. This is the Gar-fish, Hemirhamphus inter- 
medius, a slender, cylindrical type, rarely exceeding a foot in length, which occurs in 
vast shoals throughout the temperate Australian seas. From the English Gar-fish, 
genus Belone, of which there are also Australian representatives, it may be readily 
distinguished by the circumstance that it is only the lower jaw, in place of both upper 
and lower jaws, that is developed in a characteristic beak-like manner. In the lower 
of the two figures given the small rudimentary character of the elevated upper jaw is 
clearly shown. Over half-a-dozen Australian species of this genus Hemirhamphus 
have been described, several of which are exclusively denizens of the tropical 
sea-board. In an allied Australian form, Arhamphus, the beak, as the name betokens, 
is entirely suppressed. 
The fresh waters of Australia yield some fish of more phenomenal interest than 
the few already referred to. In Ceratodus Forsteri, the Lung Fish or Burnet and 
Mary River Salmon, of the Queensland colonists, is presented the only known surviving 
member of a genus which, with numerous allies, was abundantly represented in the 
Triassic and Jurassic formations of Europe, India, and America. Of its peculiar 
sub-order—the Dipnoi or lung-breathing fishes—Lepidosiren paradoxus of the Amazons 
in South America, and Protopterus annectens of tropical Africa, are again the only 
other known living types. In common with such other large-scaled fresh-water 
fishes as the Giant Perch, ZLates calcarifer and Osteoglossum Leichardti, Ceratodus 
Forsteri is commonly associated by the Queensland natives with the name of the 
“ Barramundi.” This title, in its restricted sense, is now, however, exclusively attached 
to Osteoglossum. | 
This last-named form is almost as remarkable as is Ceratodus, with reference 
to the present geographical distribution of its nearest allies. A second species, 
Osteoglossum Jardinei, has been recorded by the writer from North Queensland ; 
otherwise, the only known additional specific forms of the same genus, Osteoglossum 
bicirrhosum and O. formosum, are inhabitants respectively of the fresh-water rivers of 
Brazil, and of Borneo and Sumatra, while two allied genera Arapaima and Heterotis 
are indigenous, like the previously recorded Dipnoi, to the rivers of tropical South 
