Plate XVII.

[Read before the Hawke Bay Philosophical Institute, 12th August, 1878.]

In a “Catalogue of the Fishes of New Zealand with Diagnoses of the Species,” compiled by Captain Hutton and printed for the Colonial Museum in 1872, only one species of the genus Callorhynchus is mentioned as belonging to our seas—C. antarcticus; but, as I take it, there are several other species, two of which I have seen, viz., C. australis, Hobson, and an undescribed one, which I believe to be a species nova (C. dasycaudatus, mihi), of which I shall give a fair diagnostic and specific outline in this paper.

It was in December, 1844, that I first saw this fish. I was leaving Poverty Bay in a brig, bound for this place, when, on passing the heads, we saw some Maori canoes fishing, one of which paddled alongside and sold us some of their fish they had just taken; among them was one that I had