262 NATURAL SCIENCE. April, 



his indefatigable industry and keen powers of observation, draws 

 distinction after distinction, and creates a rather formidable number 

 of genera and species. Professor Delia Valle, besides particularly 

 treating of the Gammaridea of the Gulf of Naples, undertakes to pass 

 in review those that are recorded from every part of the world. This 

 extensive enterprise inclines him not unnaturally to ignore distinctions 

 that seem to him insignificant, and to simplify matters by cancelling 

 all genera and species of which the claims appear to be at all doubtful 

 and obscure. 



In a work belonging to the highly important series of " The 

 Fauna and Flora of the Gulf of Naples," in a work so attractively 

 printed and illustrated, and possessing the merits which are con- 

 spicuous in Professor Delia Valle's volumes, one is tempted to 

 welcome with open arms his nobly ambitious experiment in classifi- 

 catory revision. Only, one has to be sure that the revision is based 

 on adequate knowledge, and that it has been carried out with some 

 consistency of principle. For, if not, more harm than good will 

 have been done, and a huge heap of synonyms will have been added 

 to the already towering mass. 



Without further preface, then, I propose to discuss, as a 

 characteristic example of Professor Delia Valle's methods, the genus 

 Acanthozone, to which he has devoted sixteen quarto pages. Under 

 this single name he compresses together, like birds in a game pie, no 

 less than ten previously established genera. Acanthozone, meaning " a 

 girdle of spines," is a name highly appropriate to the porcupine-like 

 amphipod for which Boeck, in 1870, invented it. Sir Richard Owen 

 had already, in 1835, chosen for the same genus the name Acanthosoma, 

 of equivalent meaning, but preoccupied. The name of Boeck's choice, 

 accordingly, has superseded Owen's. But now Delia Valle intervenes, 

 and includes under this name the Plenstes of Spence Bate, dating from 

 1858, the Paramphithoe, instituted by Bruzelius in 1859, the Amphi- 

 thopsis of Boeck, which belongs to i860, and the Calliopius, so named 

 by Lilljeborg in 1865. If all these four are synonyms of Acantho- 

 zone, each one of them has rights of priority over it, and the con- 

 glomeration of species which Delia Valle has assigned to Acanthozone 

 must all be withdrawn from it, and referred to Plenstes, while each of 

 them is henceforward for ever saddled with the wrongly-attributed 

 name to swell its list of synonymy. From a bold attempt at simplifi- 

 cation such a result is truly deplorable. It is strange that the 

 Paramphithoe of Bruzelius should not have sufficed for a beacon of 

 warning, seeing that the nine species attributed to that genus by its 

 author have since been distributed among half-a-dozen genera, amid 

 which the original genus, from its vagueness, is an abiding source 

 of confusion. It is a wandering star, of which the orbit is difficult 

 to calculate. Probably its real rights, when acknowledged, will entitle 

 it to take precedence of Mr. A. O. Walker's recent Aphemsa. 



From what may be thought an accidental error of judgment in 





