The natural history of fishes, amphibians, & reptiles, or monocardian animals . are so different fromthe Acanthopteryges, where Cuvier has placed it, that wecannot discover one solitary character they possess incommon. The skeleton of Chironectes, instead of beingosseous, is, as M. Cuvier admits, semi-cartilaginous: the 202 CLASSIFICATION OF FISHES. rays of the fins are alt soft: the branchial opening, asin the Balistidce, is confined to a small slit or spiracle :the operculum is concealed beneath the skin, so that thebranchia themselves are concealed. Not one of thesecharacters belongs to the
The natural history of fishes, amphibians, & reptiles, or monocardian animals . are so different fromthe Acanthopteryges, where Cuvier has placed it, that wecannot discover one solitary character they possess incommon. The skeleton of Chironectes, instead of beingosseous, is, as M. Cuvier admits, semi-cartilaginous: the 202 CLASSIFICATION OF FISHES. rays of the fins are alt soft: the branchial opening, asin the Balistidce, is confined to a small slit or spiracle :the operculum is concealed beneath the skin, so that thebranchia themselves are concealed. Not one of thesecharacters belongs to the typical osseous fishes; while,on the other hand, every one of them are characteristicof the order now before us. Like the aberrant Balistidce,the branchial arches are very few—only four in num-ber ; and like them, also, these fishes have the power ofinflating their bodies like a balloon when agitated byfear or anger. Their remaining characters, however, arealtogether peculiar; and even their very aspect is suffi-cient to distinguish them (Chir. histrio,fig. 34.); they are. the most grotesque—we had almost said the most hide-ous—of all fishes, and, as their vernacular name of frog-fish implies, they have nearly as much the appearance offrogs or toads as of fish; this similarity may be perceivedin the headof Malthe nasuta(). The late net has very justly insisted onthe intimate affinity betweenthese strange-looking crea-tures and the file-fish, or Ba-listidce, — an affinity whichhas only been disturbed, aswe believe, in the RegneAnimal. The imaginationcan scarcely conceive more fanciful forms than such as
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, booksubj, booksubjectfishes, booksubjectreptiles
