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Show 320 MR. R. COLLETT ON CERTAIN GOBIOID FISHES. [Mar. 5, is rather incomplete) has afterwards, without any further addition, repeated in the various editions of Yarrell's History of Brit. Fishes. In May, 1844, Von Diiben and Koren in Ofv. Kgl. Vet. Akad. Forh. for the same year introduced two other species of the same group, both of which had been previously found, in Dec. 1834, in the district of Bergen, Norway, by the late naturalist, Mr. P. Stuwitz, after whom one of them was named Gobius stuwitzii. The last-named species had certainly, as ] ointed out by the authors, a decided similarity to the Scottish G. albus. Still the difference in the construction of the body, as well as of the teeth, was so obvious that they could not easily be mistaken. Instead of being plump, like L. albus, with the head thick, the cleft of the mouth wide, the teeth long, the interorbital space wide, the second dorsal and the anal fins even, G. stuwitzii was slender, with the head thin, and the cleft of the mouth short, the teeth extremely feeble, the interorbital space narrow, and the second dorsal and the anal fins diminishing behind. In 1861, Dr. Malm, in Bohuslan, Sweden, found both the named species in fully developed state, one of them (G. stuwitzii) with ripe spawn; and he therefore gave, in July 1863, in the Forh. Skand. Naturf. 9. Mote, comparative diagnoses of them, chiefly based upon the structure of the teeth and the vertical fins. When Dr. Gunther, in 1861, issued the volume of his Catalogue of the Fishes of Brit. Museum, in which he treats of the Gobioids, G. albus was made the type of the new genus Latrunculus'; but, from the description of G. stuwitzii, he did not venture to include this under the same genus ; for want of a better place he inserted it under the genus Gobiosoma, Gir., as it was still undecided that it possessed scales, which, for the first time, was proved by Dr. Malm in 1863. Prof. Gill, in the Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. of Philadelphia for 1863, even made it a type for a new genus Boreogobius, without giving even a single word of reason for this alteration; and Dr. Bleeker, in 1874, followed in his steps in the Synopsis of the Gobiidae, which he communicated in the 9th volume of Arch. Neerl. Sci. Exact, et Nat. Since the autumn of 1871,1 have found the form L. stuwitzii in the Christiania fjord in great numbers, and have collected innumerable specimens during the autumn months. All these specimens have fully agreed with the original description given by Diiben and Koren, and consequently are constantly different from that of Parnell's L. albus. Having provided myself during the first autumn with what I thought sufficient materials, consisting of several thousand specimens, I gave, in the Forh. Vid. Selsk. Christiania, 1872, a short description of the species, comparing it with the descriptions at hand of L. albus, in which I endeavoured as much as possible to keep the two species separate. During the succeeding years I tried amongst the great quantities of L. stuwitzii to find L. albus, but without 1 The name Latrunculus was employed by Dr. Gray as early as in 1847, for a Gasteropod (Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. 1847, p. 139). But, as I was informed by m y friend the late Dr. Morch, of Copenhagen, this name is quite superfluous, and will hardly ever be reemployed for that mollusk. |