REPORT ON THE CRINOJDEA. 89 



new species Comatula carinata, 1 which he had established in apparent ignorance of the 

 fact that Leach had proposed Alecto carinata in the previous year. 



The authority of the great French zoologist and the appositeness of the name which 

 he proposed both contributed to cause this somewhat ostentatious neglect of the work of 

 a fellow-countryman to be overlooked by naturalists in general ; and Lamarck's name 

 was used in succession by J. S. Miller, von Schlotkeim, de Blainville, Goldfuss, Agassiz, 

 and Minister. Among these authors Miller deserves especial mention, for he was the 

 first naturalist after Llhuyd and Linck who distinctly recognised the morphologic; il 

 resemblance between the Feather-stars and the Stalked Crinoids, a point which Lamarck 

 had entirely failed to notice ; and Miller accordingly drew up a new generic definition of 

 Comatula which was based upon this idea. 2 He seems to have preferred this name 

 to Alecto, which genus he regarded as less precisely defined than Lamarck's 

 Comatula. 



Johannes Midler also used Comatula in his first communication to the Berlin Academy 

 upon the subject of the Crinoidea; but in the next year (1841) he formally adopted 

 Alecto, Leach, as the generic name of several new species, while in the year 1843 he 

 applied it to the six Lamarckian species which he had not previously mentioned in this 

 relation, and subsequently also to the Asterias multiradiata of Linnasus. 



When Midler first proposed the name Actinometra he regarded it as denoting a genus 

 equivalent to Alecto; but he eventually reduced both these names to subgeneric rank 

 and assigned a generic position to Comatula. Dujardin and Hupe, however, dropped 

 Alecto altogether and restored generic rank to Actinometra, making it equivalent to 

 Comatula. Soon afterwards, Norman very rightly restored de Freminville's name, 

 Antedon, which had been suffered to fall into disuse ; and it is now universally used for 

 the typical Endocyclic Comatulse with five dividing rays, both recent and fossil. There 

 are, however, a very large number of generic names which have been applied to the 

 centro-dorsals of fossil Comatula?, both with and without the radials attached, e.g., 

 Glenotremites, Solanocrinus, Hertha, Decameros, Decacnemos, Allionia, Comaster, &c. 

 Pterocoma and Geocoma were the names given by Agassiz and Fraas to species from 

 the Solenhofen Slate and the Chalk of the Lebanon respectively. Ganymeda, Gray, is in 

 all probability the centro-dorsal of Antedon rosacea ; while on the other hand, Hyponome, 

 Loven, is the detached visceral mass of an Antedon common at Cape York. 



The stalked larva of Antedon was first described as a dwarf species of Pentacrinus, 

 which name Fleming proposed to change into Hibernida, this genus being distinguished 

 from Pentacrinus as then known by the presence of two openings to the digestive 

 canal. De Blainville, on the other hand, noticed the differences between the characters 



1 In his description of Antedon gorgonia de Fn'minville referred to the Encyclopt'die Mt'thodique, partie des Vera, 

 pi. cxxiv., fig. 6. But Lamarck quoted this figure as representing his Comalula mediterranean 

 s Op. cit., p. 128. 



(ZOOL. CHALL. EXP. — PART LX.- 1887.) OoO 12 



