crab-pots, in which they have been taken. Their beauty, it is true, occasionally secures them a place on the fishmonger's stall, when the specimens, at least of the rarer species, are pretty sure to be soon snatched up, not for the table, but for the shelves of some museum.
Family XVII. Fistulariadæ.
(Spinous Pipe-fishes.)
Some of the Labridæ have the faculty of protruding the mouth so excessively as to form a tube; and there is one genus, the Green Wrasses (Gomphosis), of Ceylon, in which the mouth is not protractile, but the bones are lengthened into a permanent slender tube, at the extremity of which is placed the mouth. Thus we are prepared for the very limited but very curious and interesting family of tube-mouthed fishes before us. It has, however, other analogies, among the soft-finned fishes; as in the curious genus Mormyrus, found only in the Nile, considered by Cuvier, as allied to the Pikes, which have a small mouth set at the end of a slender tube; but especially in the Syngnathidæ, perhaps the most interesting of the whole Class, for the singularity of their organization and economy, in which the bones of the face are prolonged into a tubular snout, so similar to that of the present Family, that both alike have received the popular appellation of Pipe-fishes.
The Fistulariadæ, then, are characterized by having the face prolonged into a slender tube projecting forwards, composed of elongations of
