IN Prof. Giglioli's letter on rare Mediterranean fishes, which, appeared in NATURE, vol. xxv. p. 535, he refers to specimens of Scorpaena ustulata, Lowe, obtained at Messina. In some “Notes on some rare and little known Fishes taken at Madeira,” published between 1860 and 1870 in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, I undertook to prove that the fishes on which Mr. Lowe founded that species were merely young specimens of the common Scorpaena scrofa, L. It might be well if Prof. Giglioli looked at the paper referred to before labelling his Sicilian fishes. With regard to the two Macruroid fishes, Malacocephalus laevis (Lowe), and Coryphaenoides serratus (Lowe), which the Professor captured in the Mediterranean, I may state that they are so rare at Madeira, where they were originally detected by the late Mr. Lowe, that during thirty years I have only obtained a single specimen of the former and have never met with the latter at all. It would be curious if the “singular fish of a deep black colour, with small eyes, a naked skin, and a most abyssal physiognomy,” should prove to be the rare Madeiran Gadoid, Chiasmodon niger, described by me in a paper read before the Zoological Society of London on November 10, 1863. The unique specimen was sent to the British Museum, but another example was afterwards taken in the West Indies, and figured by Dr. Carte in the Proc. Z. S. London, 1866, pl. ii. Singularly enough the stomach of the latter specimen contained a fish which exceeded the size of its swallower, and this was no other than an example of an extremely rare Madeiran species, Neoscopelus macrolepidotus, described by me in the Proc. Z. S., January 13, 1863, pl. vii.