SWOKDFISH. 
151 
fin, although shorter, in other particulars resembles the dorsal. 
The pectoral fin is situated low down, and its upper rays are 
long and pointed; the tail deeply forked. The dorsal fin, 
when complete, has, according to Risso, forty-two rays; anal 
eighteen; caudal twenty-six; pectoral seventeen, which are firm 
and bent like a scythe. The colour is dark, almost black on 
the back and tail, lighter on the sides, and white below; but 
in the Mediterranean the back is described as being of a steel 
blue. Pectoral fin yellow. 
Doctor Caius, (Keys,) who lived in the middle of the six- 
teenth century, and wrote a well-known “Natural History of 
British Dogs,” was the earliest of modern writers who notices 
this species” which he did in a communication to the naturalist 
Gesner where he particularly describes the sword-hke snout, 
from a dried specimen. He says that the upper part of this 
beak is altogether hard and bony, and, as Aristotle says, equal 
in length to the rest of the body. It is formed of two bones, 
which are so closely joined along their course from the point, 
as to appear like a single bone. Near the head they gradually 
separate, so that the upper one rises in a broader form, to 
constitute the skull, and the lower becomes the bone ot the 
palate,— the brain and eye being thus situated between them. 
Along the middle of the beak or sword there runs a depression, 
and a shallower one on each side of it, with a suture on the 
lower side; nothing of which can be discovered in the recent 
h' harbeen observed that in the development of fishes from 
the egg the ventral fins are the last of all the organs to make 
their appearance. Their absence, therefore, in many genera 
constituting the order of apodal fishes in the system of Linn^us 
is to be understood as an arrest of development, and ot which 
the genus Xiphias approaches the most nearly to the orders 
above it, by its close affinity to other Swordfishes which have 
these fins in perfection. 
