174 The Devil-fish of Jamaica. 



light waters of tlie harbour, lias been, alarmed by a sudden drench- 

 ing billow in a tranquil sea, nothing being seen to account for the 

 unexpected wave, the fact being that a devil-fish at the moment 

 had been neared by the boat, and had heaved the waters with its 

 fins in hastening away. Fortunately, the Cephaloptera is not as 

 frolicsome as it congeners, the sting-rays. The Trygon and the 

 Myliobatis will frequently spring out of the water, and pitch 

 themselves on to a distance like quoits. The Cephalopteras are 

 only fond of sauntering about in the sunshine, flapping their 

 breadth of fin in and out, first one fin and then the other. In 

 an early morning sail that I took some years ago from Passage 

 Fort to Kingston, amid the stretch of shoals there, with their 

 clumps of mangroves,* the devil-fishes were to be seen dotting the 

 waters like lotus-leaves in a pond. It is on the sands thereabout 

 that the Scyllium cirratum will be found basking by hundreds 

 in the month of July. This scyllium is the nurse-shark, and to 

 these banks the fishermen go to " strike " them, as they phrase 

 it, and take them for their oil. Here a multitude of fishes will 

 be seen sporting at early morning. The esox amuses itself with 

 leaping from left to right and from right to left over every stick 

 floating in its way. Here the Hemiramphus will be observed 

 spinning along the smooth sea in successive skips, with only his 

 tail in the water, which he uses like the propeller of a screw- 

 steamer ; and here we meet with our cetaceous dolphins rolling 

 and tumbling. Inhabitants of the water are very frolicksome 

 in the uprising daylight. I confess that when I see their 

 sportiveness, the evidence of .their exuberant enjoyment of life, 

 their swimming hither and thither, sometimes few and some- 

 times many together, swift or slow, gentle or rapid, just as it 

 pleases them, the element seems to me to have in it that espe- 

 cial pleasantness exhibited by a parcel of boys in a morning 

 bathe. Water has a feeling of comfort exceedingly appreciable, 

 and I think, above all, sea-water. 



The Cephaloptera seem to me to include in the different 

 forms of their numerous species (for the species are undoubtedly 

 many) all the caudal diversities of the ordinary ray, or skate 

 family. Some have the whip like tail of the Trygon pastinacsta, 

 armed with the serrated spine, as the gioma of the Mediterra- 

 nean ; some the same flagelliform tail, lengthened and small in 

 diameter, as in the Myliobatis aquila,but without the caudal spine, 

 as in the specimen here particularly described, which I would 

 call the Massenoidecs ; others are short-tailed and spineless, as 

 in the Raia batis, or tinker skate of Norfolk (England). Such 

 are the monster skates of Kingston harbour described by Lieut. 

 Lamont. Again, the caudal fin is forked, or double-lobed, as 



* For a very interesting account of the mangrove-tree, see Gosse's Naturalist's 

 Sojourn in Jamaica, pp. 245 — 7. 



