33° 
AMERICAN FISHES . 
Mackinnon’s experiment, tells me that the fish taken were the common 
species of New England flat-fishes and flounders. 
We fancy that the inspiration of the new advocate of the turbot-in- 
America question, as well as the information upon which he bases his con¬ 
clusion, was drawn from this very same book of Capt. Mackinnon, for 
he uses many of the same phrases, and he repeats, in almost the same 
words, Captain Mackinnon’s statement: “ The fish markets in America 
are not all in keeping with the size and wealth of the States,” a statement 
which, however true it may have been thirty years ago, will be amusing to 
any one who has recently had opportunity to compare the fish markets of 
America and Europe. This ingenious Philadelphia savant sums up his 
evidence as follows : 
“The Turbot, Sole, and Plaice are, however, in abundance in your 
deep-water sand banks. They were caught there in 1812 by English sailors, 
and in 1880 Turbot have been obtained off Atlantic City, if the ‘Balti¬ 
more American’ is any authority.” 
The notion that the introduction of the English trawl in America would 
be novel and would at once open up a field for a fishery industry of bound¬ 
less extent, deserves a word. The trawl has been assiduously used by the 
summer collecting party of the United States Fish Commission for ten 
years past, and also by Prof. Agassiz upon various exploring trips. The 
steamers of the Fish Commission have used it on every portion of the 
coast, from Yucatan to Halifax. Prof. Agassiz has used it in the 
Gulf of Mexico and on the coast of Florida, and has employed 
it in running five lines of research at right angles to the coast from Cape 
Hatteras, at points nearly equidistant between Charleston and Cape Cod, 
one of them directly out from the entrance to Delaware Bay. The 
dredgings of the Fish Commission were carried from near the shore to a 
depth of nearly five miles in the open sea, and covered a very wide area 
of the ocean bottom. 
In 1854 Prof. Baird made a careful exploration of the coast of New Jer¬ 
sey with especial reference to the fishes, and since that time every stretch 
of coast line from Brownsville, Texas, to Eastport, Me., has been 
thoroughly investigated by the naturalists of the United States Fish Com¬ 
mission. It is true that a new species of fish is occasionally discovered, but 
the new fishes always belong to one of two classes. They are either 
swift-swimming species, members of the West Indian fauna, which come 
