252 C. D. SOAR ON THE WORK OF THE LATE SAVILLE-KENT 



SO little was known about water-mites at that time in the British 

 Isles, that there could not have been many that knew what a 

 Hydrachnid was like. It is more than probable Saville-Kent did 

 not receive any answer to his inquiries. In the latter part of 

 the eighteenth century Miiller, the first naturalist to publish a 

 work entirely on water-mites, made a similar request, but he- 

 never had any material sent to him. I tried the same experi- 

 ment, bvit only received two tubes of Infusoria ; no mites were 

 sent. But if Saville-Kent did not get any water-mites sent 

 to him, he certainly succeeded in making a very considers bla 

 collection himself. 



Owing to the courtesy of Mr. Hirst, of the British Museum 

 (Natural History), South Kensington, I have been permitted 

 to look over and examine all the slides, notes and drawings- 

 which Saville-Kent had collected together with the object of 

 one day publishing his proposed Monograph. The mites were 

 mostly collected round London, so the field from which they were- 

 collected was not large. But even this small area, compared to 

 the rest of the British Isles, has yielded about one-fourth of the 

 present-known British Hydrachnids. So far, the result was very 

 satisfactory, and it is a pity Saville-Kent did not live to publish 

 the result of his study and collecting amongst the Hydrachnidae.. 

 To judge from the work he did he was a trained biologist, having 

 been a pupil of Huxley, which was a very great thing in those 

 days. It could not have been in better hands, and, as far as the 

 water-mites were known in his time, no one could have written on 

 them better. Besides which, at the time the collections were made 

 a large number that Saville-Kent found had not only not been- 

 named at all, but never even recorded. If they had been found, 

 they had been mistaken for other species, a mistake very easily 

 made when the available literature on Hydrachnidae was so small. 

 Since then, however, they have all been named and recorded on 

 the Continent, and, with two exceptions only, they have all been 

 recorded for the British Isles by other writers. The collections 

 were begun in 18G7, and went on at intervals until 1883; and, 

 with the exception of the notes in Science Gossip already referred 

 to, I have only found Saville-Kent's name mentioned in this 

 connection in a list of water-mites in Cooke's One Thousand 

 Objects for the Jficroscope. I do not know whether the few par- 

 ticulars there given were supplied by Saville-Kent himself, but- 



