Page:Natural History, Fishes.djvu/193

Rh the British Isles, and on the northern shores of Europe.

The head in this genus is enormously large in proportion to the body, very broad, depressed, and spinous in many parts; the mouth is wide, deeply cleft, armed with teeth, differing in size, but numerous, sharp and incurved; the lower jaw fringed round with a series of free fleshy filaments. The tongue is broad; the gill-cavities are capacious, but open by a small aperture; the gill-rays are six in number. There are two dorsals, separated; the summit of the head is furnished with two or three bony filaments, jointed in a peculiar way to the skull, so as to be capable of free motion in various directions. Cuvier considers these as being, structurally, the first spines of the anterior dorsal. "In the Angler, or Fishing-frog (Lophius piscatorius, .) of the British seas, the motions of these detached rays are very peculiar. Two are considerably in advance of the eyes, almost close to the upper lip; the posterior of these is articulated by a stirrup upon the ridge of the base, but the anterior one is articulated by a ring at its base, into a solid staple of the bone, thus admitting of free motion in every direction, without the possibility of displacement, except in case of absolute fracture. The third one, which is on the top of the cranium, behind the eyes, is articulated much in the same manner as the posterior one of the other two; and of course, though these two have considerable motion in the mesial plane of the fish,