OO .. General Notes. [ August, 
Sebastes, and their allies, mailed-cheeked scaly fishes, with perfect 
ventrals, short anal, and first dorsal more developed than the 
second, has its headquarters upon this coast. 
When Dr. W. O. Ayres, in the early days of the California 
Academy of Sciences, about eighteen years ago, added four addi- 
tional species to the already known eight or nine described by 
himself or by Dr. Girard, the announcement was received. wit 
doubt. > 
The writer, resident in San Francisco during the last six years, 
quickly identified all the described species but one, nor was it 
long before he perceived several types which differed somewhat 
from any of them. s, however, he was dependent for compari- 
son upon isolated examples brought to the local museum, and 
upon the supply of the market, he was unable to thoroughly con- 
vince himself whether the three or four varieties of color, accom- 
panied as they were by only slight differences in the form and 
prominence of the spines of the head, were really species, or only 
color varieties. But this question is now fully settled by Prof. D. 
S. Jordan, who, commencing at San Diego, and working north- 
wards to San Francisco, everywhere with abundant means of 
comparison, has proved that not only three or four, but eight or 
nine constant and specifically distinct types of this tribe occur, 1n 
addition to those before described; so that more than twenty 
species are now (March 14, 1880) known, and it is not unlikely that 
the list may be still further increased when Prof. Jordan and his 
comrade Mr. Gilbert have searched the coast northward to Puget 
Sound. The number of flat-fishes (Pleuronectide) now known 
to be found between San Diego and Puget Sound exceeds that 
known on the Atlantic coast of the United States. In my “ Review 
of the Pleuronectidze of San Francisco” (Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., 
1879), I enumerate thirteen species, three of them new to science. 
To these must be added a true sole, the first found upon the coast, 
discovered by Prof. Jordan at San Diego; a flounder allied to 
Hippoglossoides, but forming the type of a new genus, found by 
the same ichthyologist at Wilmington and Santa Barbara, and a 
species of Platysomatichthys (Bleeker), a stray specimen of which 
found its way into the market of San Francisco, Add to these 
the more northern Pleuronectes franklinii, and we have a total of 
seventeen species, without counting two unidentified species 
described by Pallas, a total which, in the light of recent discover- 
ies, must not be accepted as final, since the coast from 5an Fran- 
cisco northward may yield new forms to the hard-working explor- 
ers of the United States Fish Commission. The specimens of 
the Platysomatichthys found were evidently the young of a larger 
form, and Prof. Jordan confidently expects to find more and larger — 
specimens as he proceeds northward. 
The conclusion arrived at by the writer that the species re-de- 
scribed by himself as Pleuronichthys canosus is the Eleuronectes 
