Copy 1, Volume 1

A history of British fishes / By William Yarrell ... Illustrated by nearly 400 woodcuts.

  • William Yarrell
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of British fishes / By William Yarrell ... Illustrated by nearly 400 woodcuts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tory function, and as being the rudiment of the pulmonary cavity of land animals; the passage of communication with the esophagus being conceived to represent the trachea.” Hervey long ago observed “that the air in birds passed into cells beyond the substance of the lungs ; thus showing a resemblance to the cellular lungs in reptiles, and the air- bladder in fishes.” M. Agassiz, in dissecting a species of Lepisosteus, a fresh-water fish of the rivers of America, found the air-bladder composed of several cells, with a canal proceeding upwards into the pharynx, and ending in an elongated slit, with everted edges, resembling a glottis or tracheal aperture. However obvious may be these relations of structure, it is still difficult to believe there can be any analogy in function, when it is recollected that one-fourth of the fishes known are entirely without air-bladders, and that two-thirds of the other three-fourths have neither canal nor aperture for external communication, but that all are provided with gills. The search for these relations of structure in animals of different classes is among the most interesting of the inves- tigations of the comparative anatomist. ‘The sexual organs of the Sharks and Rays very closely resemble those of some of the reptiles, and the young of both these families of cartilagi- nous fishes, as far as they have been examined, are now known to possess, for a short time, external branchial fila- ments. Linneus called the cartilaginous fishes AmpuHI- BIA Nantes. The trivial names of cuculus and Cuckoo Gurnard are said to have been appropriated to this species on account of the similarity in the sound which issues from this fish when taken out of the water to the note of the well-known bird.
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