"The Spanish mackerel is surely one of the most graceful of fishes. It appeals as scarcely any other can to our love of beauty, when we look upon it, as shown in Kilbourn's well-known painting, darting like an arrow just shot from the bow, its burnished sides, silver flecked with gold, thrown into bold relief by the cool green background of the rippled sea; the transparent grays, opalescent whites, and glossy blacks of its trembling fins enhance the metallic splendor of its body, until it seems to rival the most brilliant of tropical birds. Kilbourn made copies of his large painting on the pearly linings of seashells and produced some wonderful effects by allowing the natural luster of the mother-of-pearl to show through his transparent pigments and simulate the brilliancy of the life-inspired hues of the quivering, darting sea-sprite, whose charms even his potent brush could not properly depict. "It is a lover of the sun, a fish of tropical nature, which comes to us only in midsummer, and which disappears with the approach of cold, to some region not yet explored by ichthyologists. It is doubtless very familiar in winter to the inhabitants of some region adjacent to the waters of the Caribbean or the tropical Atlantic, but until this place shall have been discovered it is more satisfactory to suppose that with the bluefish and the mackerel it inhabits that hypothetical winter resort to which we send the migratory fishes whose habits we do not understand—the middle strata of the ocean, the floating beds of Sargassum, which drift hither and thither under the alternate promptings of the Gulf-stream currents and the winter winds." The Spanish mackerel swims at the surface in moderate schools and is caught in abundance from Cape May southward. Its white flesh is most delicious, when properly grilled, and Spanish mackerel, like pampano, should be cooked in no other way. A very similar species, _Scomberomorus sierra_, occurs on the west coast of Mexico. For some reason it is little valued as food by the Mexicans. In California, the Monterey Spanish mackerel (_Scomberomorus concolor_) is equally excellent as a food-fish. This fish lacks the spots characteristic of most of its relatives. It was first found in the Bay of Monterey, especially at Santa Cruz and Soquel, in abundance in the autumn of 1879 and 1880. It has not, so far as is known, been seen since, nor is the species recorded from any other coast. The true Spanish mackerel has round, bronze-black spots upon its sides. Almost exactly like it in appearance is the pintado, or sierra (_Scomberomorus regalis_), but in this species the spots are oblong in form. The pintado abounds in the West Indies. Its flesh is less delicate than that of the more true Spanish mackerel. The name _sierra_, saw, commonly applied to these fishes by Spanish-speaking people, has been corrupted into _cero_ in some books on angling.