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14. On Some Ectoparasites in the South African Museum, Cape Town. 

 -By JAMES WATERSTON, B.D., B.Sc. 



(Plates XXV. and XXVI.) 



THE present paper owes its inception to a correspondence between 

 the writer and Dr. Peringuey, who, in 1912, submitted for identifi- 

 cation a small but important collection of ectoparasites belonging 

 to the South African Museum. A valuable portion of this material 

 consisted of Mallophaga, taken mainly on tubinarial hosts in Tristan 

 d'Acunha by P. Bonomi in 1904. But the collection as a whole 

 proved so interesting that Dr. Peringuey arranged for a more sys- 

 tematic examination of birds and mammals in the taxidermist's room 

 of the Museum. Thus during the last two years there have accumu- 

 lated in all some 5,000 examples belonging to 80-90 species of the 

 orders Siphonaptera, Anoplura, and Mallophaga, and the gathering 

 is still in progress. Partly for this reason and partly because doubt 

 still attaches to a few determinations, the whole collection is not now 

 reported upon. The residue will form the nucleus of a second 

 instalment to be published whenever sufficient material has been 

 brought together. Ultimately also Dr. Peringuey hopes there may 

 be evoked sufficient interest in the Mallophaga of South Africa to 

 justify a detailed account with figures of each species. At 

 present one must be content to notice fully only those forms that 

 appear to be new, and in other cases to add critical remarks when 

 necessary. 



Only two notes of a general nature require to be added : 

 (1) The writer has had impressed upon him forcibly, in going 

 over the Mallophaga, the cosmopolitan distribution of many species 

 of that order. This fact has been often before commented upon, but 

 it is certainly vividly illustrated when, as has happened in the 

 writer's experience, to one collecting Mallophaga from a bird shot 

 at one's door in Shetland, there arrives a consignment of precisely 



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