32 
GUIDE BOOK TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 
of imbricate plates like scale armour ; and the loricaria, which has the 
body entirely covered with a hard coat formed of angular scales ; the 
salmon, trouts, &c. 
Case 17. Different kinds of herrings, shad. 
Case 1 8. Cod, ling, whiting. Flat fish : turbot, flounders ; their 
bodies are compressed, and they lie on the white side at the bottom 
of the sea. 
Case 1 9. Remainder of the flat fish ; as the different species of 
soles, finless soles, &c. ; the lump fish, and different kinds of eels. 
Case 20. The remainder of the eels ; sea horses, so called because 
they bear a grotesque resemblance to a horse in miniature when dry 
and contracted. 
Wall Cases 20—26. Anomalous Fish. 
Case 20. Spiny globe fish, which have a beak like a parrot ; they 
have the faculty of dilating their stomach with air, hence their name. 
Case 21. The balistes or file fish, which have small teeth, and are 
covered with a hard skin; leather jackets, with a more flexible less 
armed skin. 
Case 22. The coffin fishes, covered with a hard horny skin formed 
of six or eight-sided plates, forming an even coat ; the sturgeons, from 
Europe and America. 
Cases 23, 24. The sharks; the saw-fishes, with their elongated 
head furnished with teeth on each side. 
Cases 25, 26. The rays, the torpedoes, and the sting rays. 
On the Tops of the Cases, 
Different kinds of fish which are too large to be arranged in the 
proper places in the Cases. 
Large shad with a long dorsal ray, from Mexico ; a maigre from 
Guernsey ; a sword-fish, from Margate ; a flying sword-fish, from the 
Indian Ocean, with two other pikes ; and belonging to the same kind 
of fish, one which has been forced through the oak timber of a ship. 
These fish swim so rapidly, that if they come against a ship they pierce 
it. A conger, an angel fish, a short-nosed bony pike from North Ame- 
rica; sharks; the nose of various large saw-fishes; a piraruca, from 
British Guiana; a sturgeon, and a large sting ray. 
The Tables 1 — 12. Insects. 
Tables 1 — 8. The Coleopterous Insects or Beetles; the leaf-beetle 
or mormolyce, from Java ; the burying beetle (JVecrophorus) ; the stag- 
beetle, with its long jaws like the horns of deer; the scarabaeus, which 
incloses its eggs in balls of dung, and was esteemed sacred by the 
Egyptians ; the rhinoceros, elephant, and bubaline beetles, which have 
the front of the head or the front of the thorax produced into variously 
shaped horns or humps. 
Table 2. The buprestidae, with their metallic colours, the hard wings 
of which are often used to ornament dresses in the place of spangles ; 
the lantern spring-jack ( Elater noctilucus ), with a spot on each side of 
the thorax, luminous when living ; the various kinds of glow-worms, 
curculians or long-nosed beetles, as the diamond beetle, from Brazils ; 
the prionii, which have very long jaws, and live chiefly in old wood ; 
£he harlequin beetle with its very long fore legs. 
