DEVIL-FISH, a name given by fishermen along the southern Atlantic and gulf coasts of the United -States to a cartilaginous fish of the ray family, ceratopterus vain: pipits, Mitch. The outline of the fish is nearly an !softies triangle, the apex at the tail,. the altitude of the triangle, or length of the fish, being about half the breadth, from tip to tip, of the pectoral tins. Specimens are described as 10 ft. long, 22 ft. wide, and weighing 4 or 5 tons. A mounted specimen iS in the museum of the Chicago academy of sciences. It is a small fish of the kind; 53- ft. long, 11 ft. broad, 18 in. thick at about 2 ft. behind the mouth; and probably weighed 700 lbs. when alive. The skin is thin and rough, like that of a shark; color, slaty-black above, creamy-white beneath, but darker along the edge. The head, slightly protuberant along the base of the tri angle, is retracted; mouth large and cavernous; nostrils near the angles of the mouth, in the under surface of the upper jaw; eyes protruding at the side of the head; ears, or auricular openings which serve the purpose, a little to the rear of the eVes. The mouth is armed at either side by a flat cartilaginous protuberance, in the specimen mentioned about 12 in. long, and of the breadth and thickness of a man's hand; in life, the creature can twist this into a cone, which resembles a horn, whence the part eera in the generic name. These members, perhaps, act like hands in sweeping food into the mouth.
There are 5 large, linear, brachial openings• on each side of the under surface, in the rear of the lower jaw. The tail is very slender, like a whip-lash, four-sided, and so rough that a lash received from it would cut to the bone. The stomach of this fish con tained about two bushels of partly digested of a species which grows abundantly in southern waters. The evidence is against the supposition that it consumes any con siderable quantity of animal food. See CEPHALOPThIlA, ante.
In his Travailleurs de la ?tier, Victor Hugo gives a thrilling account of a nameless and horrid monster which lie calls pieurre, a word rendered by his translators "devil-fish." The celebrity of the narrative has attached the name to the creature there described, but which does not really exist- as pictured by the novelist. The account most nearly fits the cephalopodous mollusk called the potilpe (see ante), which, grows. to a large size in tropical waters.
The name is also to a fish better known as the angler, kophius piscatorius (see ante), and by ignorant fishermen to various other fishes of grotesque appearance.