ESOCID.E. 129 



is entirely formed by the intermaxillaries ; and also a row of keeled scales on each 

 side of the belly, the scales which cover the rest of the body being scarcely appa- 

 rent : but they are like the mackerels in the posterior rays of the dorsal and anal, 

 being distributed in detached finlets. 



The >S. scutellatus, described by Le Sueur, was taken from the stomach of a cod 

 caught on the banks of Newfoundland ; and the S. equirostrum of the same natu- 

 ralist is known only by a specimen in the Boston Museum. Nothing is said of 

 their habits, but they are probably similar to those of the European species — the 

 Gowdnook, or Egypt-herring of the Scottish fishermen, which enters the Firth of 

 Forth in considerable shoals almost every autumn. " It is," says Mr. Neill, " a 

 stupid inactive fish, which is left on the shallows at the ebbing of the tide, with its 

 long nose sticking in the mud, and is picked up in hundreds by the people from 

 Kincardine, Alloa, and other places *." 



[56.] 2. The Brazilian Pike of Pennant is most probably a Scomber-esox. 

 It resembles, it is true, a Hemiramphus in the great prolongation of the lower jaw ; 

 but this sub-genus is characterised in the Regne Animal as having moderately 

 large round scales, and no detached finlets behind the dorsal and anal: the known 

 hemiramphi, moreover, inhabit the tropical seas, and it is, therefore, less likely that 

 one should be found so far north on the Labrador coast as Croque Harbour, where 

 Pennant's fish was taken. The following is that naturalist's account of it. 



" Pike with the under jaw very slender, and twice as long as the upper : the head smooth : 

 body covered with small scales : the dorsal and anal fins opposite : between them and the tail 

 a row of small spurious fins like the mackerel. Taken off Croque Harbour, and communi- 

 cated to me by Sir Joseph Banks." {Arctic Zoology, Suppl., p. 145.) 



[57.] 1. Exocetus exiliens. (Bloch.) North American Flying-fish. 



Family, Esocidae, Cuvier. Genus, Exocetus, Linn. 



The Exoceti, or Flying-fish, are readily known from all the other groups of the 

 same order by the very great size of their pectoral fins, which spread out so as to 



* Wernerian Transactions, i., p. 542. 



