322 BULLETIN 82, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



credited the species to Lamarck but placed Leach's Alecto carinata without question 

 in the synonymy. He again referred to the figures on Griffith's plate 8. 



In 1854 Claude (or Claudio) Gay described in detail a new species which he called 

 Comaiula picta; he gave Chile as the habitat of this new species. The specimens upon 

 which he based this new species had been sent to the Paris Museum from South 

 America by himself many years before, and when he came to look them up in the 

 course of his work on the zoology of Chile he found them there bearing the manu- 

 script name Comatula picta, which had been given them by Achille Valenciennes. 

 I examined these specimens at the Paris Museum in 1910. There are 11 of them, 

 and they are labeled "Comatula picta; Chili; M. Gay, 1829." This species does not 

 occur in Chile, and it is therefore important to determine the true place of origin of 

 Gay's specimens, which are of the common Brazilian type. 



Gay was a French botanist and traveler, born at Draguignan in 1800. He went 

 to Paris and devoted himself to the study of the natural sciences, especially botany, 

 zoology, and geology, later traveling in Greece, Asia Minor, and a part of the Orient. 

 He was appointed professor of physics and chemistry in 1828 and in that year left for 

 Chile, primarily for the purpose of studying in the field the rich flora and fauna of 

 that country. On his way to Chile he stopped at Rio de Janeiro where, devoting his 

 attention especially to botany, h'e made a collection of more than 400 plants, which 

 were described by Adrien de Jussieu (in Augustin F. C. P. de Saint-Hilaire, with 

 Adrien de Jussieu and J. Cambessedes, Flora Brasiliae Meridionalis, Paris, 1825-1833; 

 cited by Gay as Jussieu, Flore du Bre'sil). But at Rio de Janeiro he also made 

 collections of insects, shells, and other animals. In a letter published in 1833 (Ann. 

 Sci. Nat., vol. 28, 1833, p. 371) he remarked that near Rio de Janeiro fresh water and 

 marine shells Ampullaria, Mytilus, and Solen live mixed together in brackish water. 

 Later Charles Darwin, in mentioning the intricate wilderness of lakes near Mandetiba, 

 east of Rio de Janeiro (Journal of Researches, 1871, p. 21), said that in some the shells 

 were fresh-water forms, in others marine, and noted that Gay had found both fresh- 

 water and marine shells mixed in brackish water in the neighborhood of Rio. Gay 

 was in Rio in 1829 and did not reach Chile until 1830. We have his own statement to 

 the effect that he devoted much time to making collections in the neighborhood of 

 Rio, collections both of plants and of animals. 



As his specimens in the Paris Museum are dated 1829, and Rio was the only 

 place where he collected extensively in that year, and the only place visited by him on 

 the coast of South America where this species occurs, it is a logical conclusion that 

 the specimens in the Paris Museum upon which Comaiula picta was based came 

 originally from Rio. They were probably received at the Museum in a shipment from 

 Chile and erroneously assumed to have been collected there. The specimens remained 

 at the Museum many years before they were studied, and in this long interval Gay 

 might very well have forgotten the exact place where he had collected them, as he 

 was not especially interested in the echinoderms. While they were awaiting his 

 return M. Valenciennes gave them the manuscript name of Comatula picta. 



The description of Comatula picta is very good and shows a considerable knowl- 

 edge of the comatulids on the part of the writer or at least on the part of the one 

 who prepared the notes from which it was drawn up. I suspect that it was based 

 upon notes provided by Valenciennes. Valenciennes never described any crinoids, 



