302 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



University, and hoped that a minute anatomical and micro- 

 scopic examination of it would be made. 



V. Anatomical Description of the Complex Generative Organs 

 of a Cod Fish. By Ramsay H. Traquair, M.D. 



Dr Traquair made some short remarks as to the anato- 

 mical details of this peculiar state of the generative organs, 

 which, however, he had not been able as yet to examine 

 very particularly. 



VI. Notice of various specimens of the deformed variety of the Morrhua 

 vulgaris, the common Cod Fish, the Lord Fish of Yarrell, recently 

 taken in the Firth of Forth. By John Alexander Smith, M.D. 

 (The specimens were exhibited.) 



Dr Smith said he was indebted to Mr Charles Muirhead, 

 Queen Street, for the specimens of the peculiar deformed- 

 looking cod fish now exhibited ; this fish was figured and 

 designated by Yarrell, in his " British Fishes," vol. ii., as the 

 Lord Fish, and was generally considered as an accidental 

 deformity, due, as was formerly shown to the Society in 

 December 1855, by Dr T. Spencer Cobbold [see Proceed- 

 ings, vol. i. p. 51], to a remarkable shortening and coalescence 

 of some of the vertebrae, from disease, giving it thus a sort 

 of humpbacked appearance. 



A carefully detailed account of the same peculiarity has 

 also been given by Dr Robert Dyce to the British Associa- 

 tion at its meeting in Aberdeen in 1859, which was published 

 in the "Annals and Magazine of Natural History" for 1860. 



Dr Dyce, in his communication, also shows that the 

 peculiarity of shape is due to disease, and points out the 

 identity of Yarrell's " Lord Fish" with the Morrhua vulgaris, 

 and also with the " Speckled Cod," the Morrhua punctata of 

 Turton's " British Fauna," 1807. 



The strange peculiarity, however, and one not easily ex- 

 plained, lay in the fact stated to him by Mr Bargh, Mr 

 Muirhead's assistant, that these fish were not uncommon at 

 this particular season of the year, and that in a take of six or 



