1881.] : _ «Loblogy. 321 
side of the gullet. The mouth is surrounded by barbels, and in 
preserved examples is scarcely visible. The fishermen of Mon- 
terey declare that one of these parasitic fishes will devour a fisa 
of six or eight pounds weight in a single night. It is especially 
destructive to fish taken in gill-nets. When the hulk is taken out 
of the net, the hag scrambles out with great alacrity. It reaches 
a length of fourteen inches, and is not used for food at Monterey. 
Prof. Verrill has described in the Proceedings of the National 
Museum, a large number of new mollusks, echinoderms, annelids, 
etc., many of which were obtained last summer in the remarkably 
successful dredging explorations of the U. S. Fish Commission 
about one hundred miles south of Newport, R. I. upon the slope 
of the continent where it plunges under the Gulf Stream. Among _ 
the most interesting discoveries were nearly fresh shells of Ar- 
§-nauta argo, which indicate that this shell must often be com- 
mon near our coast. Quantities of a large, handsome but very 
fragile cup-coral ( Alabellum gocdei Verr.) occurred. While many 
of the species of every class obtained are Arctic or belong to the 
cold waters found at similar or greater depths on the coasts of 
Europe and in the Mediterranean, a few genera, like Avicula, 
Solarium and Marginella are related to southern or West Indian 
forms. Though the very large collections of specimens obtained 
on these three trips of the /ish-hawk have, as yet, been only par- 
tially examined, enough has already been done to prove this 
region to be altogether the richest and most’ remarkable dredging 
ground ever discovered on our coast. As we have before 
remarked, the scientific results of the work of the U. S. Fish 
-ommission are of the highest value; were it not for Government 
aid in this direction, to say nothing of the practical value of such 
researches, as showing where and on what kind of food our edi- 
ble sea fishes live in winter, we could never, by private enterprise, 
have arrived at the knowledge of our marine fauna which we now 
Possess, nor have got at many facts in distribution which bear 
on geological and palzontological ‘problems. The Bulletin of 
the Museum of Comparative Zodlogy, Vol. vit, No. 1, contains 
a preliminary study of the Crustacea dredged in the Gulf of Mexivo 
by the U.S. coast survey steamer Blake in 1877,’78 and ’79, by M. 
Alphonse Milne-Edwards ; Mr. Alexander Agassiz being the nat- 
uralist of the expedition.——Although one of the toughest of mol- 
lusks, it appears, on the authority of Mr. A. W. Roberts in the 
Scientific American, that the winkle ( Sycotypus canaticulatus ) may 
added to our list of edible mollusks, from the fact that a col- _ 
T., of colored people back of Keyport, N. J., known as “ Winkle — 
wn,” live largely on these shell-fish. 
