218 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION. 
be sold in which salt produces no cautionary effect, for in 
tlie year in wliicli I put together these fish-notes, our island 
newspapers recorded an instance in which four persons in 
Kingston were suffering from fish-poison — the fish being 
salted, or, as it was called, “ corned Baracouta.” 
All the fishes we have been considering and treating of 
as adventitiously poisonous, belong to the great division 
Acanthopterygii, or hard-spined fishes ; we proceed to con- 
sider now some of the soft-spined, or Malacopterygians. 
One species is at all times to be found dangerous eating. 
It has certain specific marks. The sprat of the Caribean 
Sea, the fish referred to, is not properly a Clupea, but one 
of the allied genus Alosa, or shad. The opinion that this 
is the only fish to be considered permanently poisonous, 
and that larger fishes become deleterious in flesh by feed- 
ing on them when they shoal on particular banks, is alto- 
gether gratuitous as an explanation of the fatal and harm- 
less influences which prevail at different seasons among the 
fishes taken on our shores. It was Bather Labat who first 
started this notion ; but, as Oliver Goldsmith in his work 
on Animated Nature (Book iii., ch. ii. , History of Fishes) 
observes, “ it only removes our wonder a little further 
back, for it may be asked with as just a cause for curiosity, 
how comes the permanently poisonous fish to procure its 
noxious qualities.” 
There is a harmless as well as a hurtful sprat. The 
noxious is distinguished from the harmless by the presence 
of a spot at the operculum. The fish that may be safely 
eaten has the same spot, but golden yellow. Are they 
different species, or are they one and the same, only indi- 
cating different conditions ? The question has never been 
