EINAR LÖNNBERG, 
(Schwed. Siidpolar-Exp. 
2 
The collection comprises as well shore fishes as pelagic, resp. benthopelagic, 
fishes. The latter will be described in a separate chapter. The former again are 
collected at many différent stations as well in the subantarctic as within the true 
Antarctic Region. The localities group themselves, however, naturally round certain 
geographical areas, viz. Tierra del Fuego with Staaten Island and surrounding seas, 
the Falklands with the Burdwood Bank, South Georgia, and finally the South Shet- 
lands-Graham Land complex of islands and lands. I have therefore found it most 
suitable to treat the fishes of these areas separately, the more so as, as will be shown 
in the following, these areas from a zoogeographical point of view, to a certain de- 
gree, form units. By this I mean that the fishes of one such area are not all of them 
wholly identical with those of another area, but at least some of them represented 
by similar fishes which in certain instances, although in many respects corresponding, 
are specifically different, in others only subspecifically, or racially. This difference 
is a natural result of isolation, because the shore fishes of one district have been 
prohibited by wide interjacent areas of deep water to interbreed with their con- 
geners in another district. This can, of course, only hold good for such fishes which 
have demersal eggs, and which, at no period of their life, lead a pelagic life. Al- 
though the development and life-history of the Nototheniidæ are very imperfectly 
known, it might be assumed per analogiam from what we know about arctic fishes, 
that shore fishes living in such a cold climate, as most of the Nototheniidæ do, 
hardly can have a pelagic development. In certain instances the comparatively large 
size of the eggs indicate that they are demersal. It also happens, especially among 
the members of this family, that geographical species, resp. subspecies, have been 
developed and substitute each other within different districts. 
When the differences between the representative species are very great and the 
characteristics easily seen no systematist would hesitate to describe each under a 
separate name. When the distinguishing characteristics between the fishes of one 
region and those of another are less sharply marked and less numerous, the opinion 
of different ichthyologists might perhaps take different expressions. Some might 
create new species, others might unite several forms under one and the same name. 
It is the old case “splitter” versus “lumper”. It seems to me that both extremes 
should be avoided. When two fishes from two different localities are essentially 
alike and exhibit the same type, so to say, but at the same time differ through 
some perhaps small, but always constant characteristics, they may be regarded as 
belonging to one and the same species, but as being subspecifically distinct, 
and to express this, three names may be used, as rather extensively has already 
been done in the masthological and ornithological literature, but comparatively little 
in the ichthyological. In such a way the unity as well as the diversity has been 
duly recognized, as they ought to be. When describing the present material I have 
