676 BULLETIN 82, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



series are composed. He said that Lamarck's original specimen of Comatula rotalaria 

 in the Paris Museum is wrongly labeled Comatula brevicirra. 



A specimen from Cape Baudin collected by Pe'ron and Lesueur is evidently the 

 one which Carpenter found labeled Comatula brevicirra and took to be the type of 

 Lamarck's Comatula rotalaria. It is also undoubtedly the one on which Dujardin 

 (1 862) based the suggestion that brevicirra and parvicirra are identical. This specimen 

 I examined in 1910 and found to be an example of Comanthus parvicirra. It can 

 not, however, be the type of that species. 



Under the name of Comatula rotalaria I found the 2 specimens which were 

 described by Lamarck as that species, and were later redescribed by Muller. They 

 were properly labeled, and I do not understand how they were overlooked by Car- 

 penter. 



I also found and studied the specimen of parvicirra from the voyage of the 

 Astrolabe collected by Hombron and Jacquinot at Vavao in 1841 and described by 

 Muller in 1849. 



In the same memoir Carpenter said that in 3 species of Actinometra from the 

 Challenger collection the anterior arms are longest, although all the arms, anterior 

 and posterior alike, are grooved and bear tentacles. He does not again refer to this 

 statement, and he never indicated the species to which he referred. One of these 

 species, however, he subsequently (18S8) described under the name of Actinometra 

 elongata. 



In 1 881 Carpenter published a further discussion of Actinometra parvicirra under 

 which he placed as synonyms Alecto timorensis Muller, Actinometra armata P. H. 

 Carpenter, and Actinometra polymorpha P. H. Carpenter. 



He mentioned having found the specimen from Vavao in the Paris Museum 

 under the name of Comatula brevicirra. 



He said that 3 small specimens from the voyage of Pe'ron and Lesueur may 

 possibly be the originals of Alecto parvicirra, and remarked that the chief difficulty 

 in the way of this identification is the fact that in all of them there are less than 20 

 arms, while Muller gave 27 for parvicirra. 



He added that whether they are the types or not they are specifically identical 

 with the one from Vavao which Muller had placed under parvicirra. 



He wrote that the closer examination of the Paris specimens which he made 

 'Juring his second visit to the Paris Museum (in 1880), aided by the knowledge gained 

 during 4 years of pretty continuous study of the comatulids, had led him to identify 

 parvicirra with the series of specimens from the Philippine Islands which he had 

 described under the name of Actinometra polymorpha. 



Two specimens from Solor, one from Ceram, and another from an unknown 

 locality in the East Indies which he found in the Leyden Museum were recorded, 

 together with one from Kupang, Timor, in the Berlin Museum. 



In the Challenger report on the stalked crinoids (1884) Carpenter published many 

 anatomical observations on this species based on dissections of some of Semper's 

 specimens from the Philippines. He also mentioned it as the type of a special species 

 group within the genus Actinometra characterized by having the IIBr series 4 (3+4). 



Prof. F. Jeffrey Bell in 1884 recorded, as Actinometra parvicirra, a small specimen 

 collected by the Alert at Warrior Reef and determined for him by Dr. P. H. Carpenter, 



