The Devil-fish of Jamaica. 



169 



between the pectoral and the dorsal fin. The long slender tail 

 has three angular surfaces, and diminishes to a point." 



The monstrous skate, said by Pere Labat to have been ob- 

 served by the negroes of Guadaloupe, and described as fourteen 

 feet French broad, and ten feet from the head to the com- 

 mencement of the tail, with the tail fifteen feet more, and alto- 

 gether twenty-five feet long, was obviously a kindred ray to 

 our devil-fish ; and the monster spoken of by the early voyagers 

 as suffocating the pearl divers, and known by the name of 

 Manta, was a similar animal. But the devil-fishes, best known 

 in Kingston harbour, which we will notice by and bye, differ 

 from these species by having a tail short in length, but agree- 

 ing with the specimen recently taken, in being without any 

 serrated spine, like the sting of the sting-ray. 



I feel surprised that so careful an observer of distinctions 

 in species as Mr. Yarrel, should have entertained the supposi- 

 tion that Kisso, in recording two Mediterranean Oephalopteras, 

 had mistaken one and the same species in two conditions of 

 growth, — the Giorna, and the Massena. He says : — "- 1 am 

 aware that M. Kisso considers he has found, in addition to the 

 Giorna, a second species in the vicinity of Nice ; but several 

 good authorities believe that his examples of Gephaloptera Mas- 

 sena are only old and large specimens of Gephaloptera Giorna. ,} 

 Now, independent of the precise distinctions set down b}^ 

 Risso in the two species, he mentions as particular differences 

 the tail spine that is present in one and wanting in the others. 

 His words are conerning the Giorna, "aculeo longissimo ad 

 basin caudse apterygise ;" and Massena, " aculeo nullo in cauda 

 trifariam aspera." This is a very important difference. The 

 aculeus or sting is wanting in all our Oephalopteras, and the 

 lengthened tail is found only in the species I now notice. In 

 that respect it agrees with Father Labat' s monster of Ghiada- 

 loupe, and differs from Le Vaillant's Atlantic specimens, and 

 from the enormous fishes described by Lieutenant Lamont in 

 the Edinburgh Journal of Science ; and from the gigantic ray 

 taken in Delaware Bay by the smack " Una," and described 

 by Mr. Mitchel in a letter to the president of the New York 

 Lyceum of Natural History, in 1828. Having made these in- 

 troductory remarks, I shall proceed to give my notes of the 

 fish of April the 10th. 



The position of the eyes is peculiar ; the direct vision, that 

 is, the seeing of objects immediately ahead of the fish, is cut 

 off entirely by that projecting extension of the pectorals at 

 their junction with the head, which gives the head the appear- 

 ance of having horns. A divergence of the pectoral fins here 

 forms two flat flaps when opened out, but they are always ver- 

 tically rolled up, twisted like a coiled leaf, with a twirl that 



