|2. - - The EchinnderiH Fauna of South Afri<-<t l!v I ln;i:i;T LYMAN 

 CLARK. (\Vilh Plates VIII X XI 1 1.) 



INTRODUCTION. 



Knowledge of the Echinoderm fauna of South Africa has not kept 

 pace either with our zoological knowledge of the region or with our 

 knowledge of echinoderms in general. The literature dealing with 

 it is scanty and scattered and there are vast stretches of coast line 

 where no collector has yet been. During the years preceding the 

 voyage of the Challenger, a few echinoderms taken at the Cape of 

 Good Hope came into the hands of zoologists in Europe but prior to 

 1875, there were scarcely thirty species recorded from the region; 

 with the exception of one comatulid and three or four holothurians, 

 these were about equally divided among the sea-stars, brittle-stars 

 and sea-urchins. The visit of the Challenger marks the real begin- 

 ning of our knowledge of the echinoderm fauna of South Africa. 

 During her stay of seven weeks at Cape Town, her naturalists col- 

 lected '23 species of echinoderms of which about half were new to 

 science. At stations 141 and 142, just off the Cape, 18 additional 

 species were taken of which half were new. The reports on the 

 echinoderms taken by the Challenger are in every case monographic 

 and it is possible to determine from them the species known from 

 the Cape region during the "eighties" including the Gazelle collection. 

 We find there were all told some 80 species listed but not all of these 

 were reliable records, so that it is safe to say the number of echino- 

 derms actually known from South Africa at the close of the nineteenth 

 century was not in excess of 75 species. There were about thirty 

 additional species recorded from Mozambique, but many of these 

 were improperly identified and for this, and similar reasons, it is 

 hard to say how many valid species really were known from that 

 Portugese settlement. 



The early years of the present century saw a great advance in the 

 collecting and study of the echinoderms of the South African region. 

 The Valdivia made a short stay at Cape Town and several of the 

 Antarctic exploring vessels have stopped there. A German expediton 

 collected at Angra Pequena Bay in 1903-05 and also secured material 

 at the Cape. The holothurians of this collection were reported on 



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