6.-General Catalogue of South African Crustacea (Part V. of S.A. Crustacea, for the Marine Investigations in South Africa)*.-By the Rev. THOMAS R. R. STEBBING, M.A., F.R.S., F.L.S., F.Z.S., Fellow of King's College, London, Hon. Memb. New Zealand Inst., Hon. Fellow Worcester College, Oxford.

THE first part of this treatise on the crustacean fauna of South Africa was published ten years ago. A systematic review of the subject was then and has since been deferred, in order that important additions to our knowledge of it, resulting from recent researches, might be more or less adequately dealt with. In the meantime the extensive collections made by Dr. Gilchrist, during the Pieter Faure expeditions, together with material provided by Dr. Péringuey and several other naturalists, have so greatly enlarged the task of description, that any methodical survey has run a chance of being indefinitely postponed. Over and over again, in drawing up this present Catalogue, I have felt that it may be misleading, should any one hastily infer from it that such and such tribes or families are scantily represented, or that this or that genus has no species, in South African waters. Almost at every point I have been tempted to linger over the illustration and definition of new species, or the discussion of forms not hitherto recorded from the district. As will be seen, the temptation has sometimes been too strong to be overcome. Thus a crab so long known as Hexapus sexpes (Fabricius) has been drawn and quartered afresh; a new crab has been described and figured as Nasinatalis disjunctipes in the tribe Oxystomata; further, the plates claim to exhibit a new Pagurid, a new Isopod, two new Caprellids, and two new species of Sympoda, one of them suggesting the institution of a new genus and a new family. Obviously, however, most of the Catalogue deals with names already

Parts I.-III. have been published in the "Marine Investigations in South Africa," Part IV. in Vol. VI. of the Annals of the South African Museum.

published. Among these here and there I have ventured fearfully to introduce some changes, as in proposing Pachos among the Copepoda in place of the preoccupied Pachysoma, Claus, and in vindicating Ostrapoda, Straus, against Ostracoda, Latreille.

The substitution of Egeon for Risso's preoccupied Egeon appears to originate, not as I formerly supposed with Guérin, but with Kinahan in 1857, who at that date rejected the genus, but revived it in 1862, and to him the name is therefore rightly attributed by J. V. Carus in 1885.

Nocticula, J. V. Thompson, 1829, claims rather fuller notice than I have given it on p. 396. Sars quotes it as Noctiluca. But Thompson may have had his own reasons for adopting an anagrammatic form founded on that name rather than the name itself. Actually in his Researches, vol. i., pt. 1, Mem. 3, p. 52, he prints Nocticula. He explains that he establishes this genus for an animal discovered and named by Sir Joseph Banks as "Cancer fulgens (Macartney Phil. Trans., 1810)," pl. 14, fig. 1 and 2. On p. 53 he takes the liberty of renaming this animal "Nocticula Banksii or Luminous Shrimp." Thompson's scholarship was evidently not on a par with his scientific ability, since he calls the group to which his new genus belongs Shizopoda. But Nocticula would be valid, if its species

could be identified.

The Catalogue may expect to be reproached for its great length. As its foster-parent I venture to urge in its defence that ships bound for almost anywhere take South Africa on their way and fish in its teeming waters without remorse. That is not the only thing. It is well known that by a legal fiction an ambassador carries a circumambient fragment of his own country with him into the land to which he is accredited. But as an actual fact the earth of African lakes, transferred to the aquaria of Professor Sars in Norway has yielded in that distant clime a plentiful crop of true South African Crustacea. The length, then, of the Catalogue is not due to any malice of its own, but to the wonderful activity of carcinologists in recent years. Apologies indeed are due for the omission of innumerable important references, balanced by apologies to students of the modern school who will perhaps regard most of those that are given as entirely superfluous.