xvi Obituary Notice of Fellow deceased. 



Proterosaurus from the upper Permian of Thuringia and Durham, show 

 how correctly Dr. G-iinther had anticipated the extension of the group. 



The treatise, along with Lieut.-Colonel Sir Lambert Playfair, on the Fishes 

 of Zanzibar, added many new species to the fauna of the East Coast of Africa, 

 and by the patronage of the Government of Bombay the authors were able 

 to illustrate their volume with finely coloured lithographic plates by Ford. 



The eight volumes of the Catalogue of Fishes in the British Museum is a 

 work of extraordinary research, the list of the authors and their works alone 

 occupying, for example, in the first volume of the Acanthopterygian Fishes, 

 about 12 pages. Thus in the first two volumes the number of species in each 

 is nearly double that of Cuvier and Valenciennes, the last general ichthyo- 

 logical work, more than double in the third, and so on throughout the series. 

 The labour of examining the descriptions and determining species by them, 

 of correcting erroneous interpretations, and of giving an account of each 

 which would have the " distinctness of a diagnosis and the accuracy of a 

 description," must have been enormous, not to allude to the task of going 

 over the numerous special and ever increasing collections in and beyond the 

 Museum, and correcting the synonymy. It is not generally known that the 

 author worked at the first three volumes under great disadvantages, especially 

 in regard to financial aid and time, facts which should be borne in mind in 

 their review. The vast area from which the collections were drawn 

 sufficiently explains the nature of the undertaking, since Arctic and 

 Antarctic, Temperate and Tropical seas and fresh waters, were equally 

 ransacked for their fishes. Yet in the second volume he was far from 

 being satisfied as to the completeness of the task, since so many forms 

 entirely new to science had rewarded him, that he urged the collection of 

 fishes in every country, for, he added, " we may well conclude that not 

 one-tenth of existing species are known " (1860). 



In his progress with the task allotted to him, he states that though weighty 

 reasons have been brought forward against the natural limits of the 

 Acanthopterygian order of Johannes Miiller, he still feels satisfied with 

 Muller's ordinal arrangement, and is of opinion that no character is of 

 equal importance to that of the structure and position of the fins, and 

 that the number of the vertebrae is of great value in distinguishing 

 families. He, however, shared the opinion of those who consider the 

 coalescent pharyngeal bones as of sufficient importance to unite acanthopterous 

 and malacopterous fishes into one order, and changed the name Pharyngognathi 

 acanthopteri into Acanthopterygii pharyngognathi. His Acanthini coincide 

 essentially with the Malacopterygii jiogulares of the old authors, and he 

 observes they are a very natural order. His experienced remarks concerning 

 the cod and the sole are worthy of remembrance, some ichthyologists placing 

 them indeed in distinct orders ; but the absence of symmetry is the only 

 constant character on which such an opinion can be founded, and it is but 

 little developed in the more highly organised forms such as Psettodes, a genus 

 in which the asymmetry is almost entirely limited to the position of the eyes, 



