Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/346

324 they hold their ground very firmly, yet how they do so we have not discovered. Neither can we understand how the nursing father avoids swallowing his progeny; we are also ignorant at what period of their life the young ones leave the paternal mouth to live independently.

The Chromis pater-familias is 7 inches long by $1 3⁄4$ inch thick. The teeth are very fine and sharp, disposed in several rows. The snout is obtuse, conical, the upper profile oblique. The nasal prominence is very conspicuous. The caudal fin is almost truncated. The soft rays of the dorsal reach to the beginning of the caudal. The length of the body, including the tail, is $4 1⁄2$ times its thickness. The snout is in length twice the diameter of the orbit. The mouth is slightly oblique, large, as wide as it is long. The teeth are slightly recurved, disposed in three or four rows, tinged with deep yellow at the free end. The first row presents 26 on each side of the upper maxillary. The fins show the number of rays following:

The lateral line comprises 32 scales disposed 20+12. The scales are cycloidal, their length greater than their breadth; three-fourths of their surface is covered by the succeeding scales. Color, olive-green on the back, barred with blue. The belly has a silvery lustre, with green and blue spots.

I caught this interesting species, with a net, on the 29th of April, 1875, in shallow water full of reeds, on the margin of Lake Tiberias, at a place called Ain-Tin, the ancient Capernaum. There are numerous warm springs there which unite to form a rather considerable stream. It is in these warm waters that the Chromis lives.—La Nature.



ANY edifying commonplaces might doubtless be written on the intellectual fermentation, if it may not rather be called confusion of the age. Nor can it be denied that tendencies supposed to have been long ago slain and sepulchred have risen again, and are asserting themselves with a hardihood which our fathers would have deemed impossible. When we find a scientific work—at any rate: work written by an eminent scientific man, and devoted to the 