Knowing how much _Nature_ is read by all the naturalists of the world, I
send these few lines, which I hope will be of some interest.

The Italian R.N. corvette Vettor Pisani left Italy in April, 1882, for a
voyage round the world with the ordinary commission of a man-of-war. The
Minister of Marine, wishing to obtain scientific results, gave orders to
form, when possible, a marine zoological collection, and to carry on
surveying, deep-sea soundings, and abyssal thermometrical measurements. The
officers of the ship received their different scientific charges, and Prof.
Dohrn, director of the Zoological Station at Naples, gave to the writer
necessary instructions for collecting and preserving sea animals.

At the end of 1882 the Vettor Pisani visited the Straits of Magellan, the
Patagonian Channels, and Chonos and Chiloe islands; we surveyed the Darwin
Channel, and following Dr. Cuningham's work (who visited these places on
board H.M.S. Nassau), we made a numerous collection of sea animals by
dredging and fishing along the coasts.

While fishing for a big shark in the Gulf of Panama during the stay of our
ship in Taboga Island, one day in February, with a dead clam, we saw
several great sharks some miles from our anchorage. In a short time several
boats with natives went to sea, accompanied by two of the Vettor Pisani's
boats.

Having wounded one of these animals in the lateral part of the belly, we
held him with lines fixed to the spears; he then began to describe a very
narrow curve, and irritated by the cries of the people that were in the
boats, ran off with a moderate velocity. To the first boat, which held the
lines just mentioned, the other boats were fastened, and it was a rather