REPORT ON THE CRINOIDEA. 197 



Verrill 1 has referred it to the Caribbean fauna, but with a ? ; while Dujardin and Hupe\ 2 

 who must have seen it for themselves in the Paris Museum, refer to it as having come 

 "de l'Amerique septentrionale." We know nothing respecting any Comatulae on the 

 Pacific coast of Central and North America, and I strongly suspect that Milbert's specimen 

 must have been wrongly labelled. 



Under the name of Comatula lasvissima, Grube 3 described in 1875 two ten-armed 

 examples of Antedon which he had obtained from Borneo ; and Professor Schneider, 

 Grube's successor at Breslau, has been good enough to send them to me for examination. 

 They agree pretty closely in the characters of their cirri and short arm-joints ; but, as is 

 indicated in Grube's diagnosis, their colour is altogether different, while one of them has 

 a tubercular junction between the two outer radials and also between the first two 

 brachials, a character which is altogether absent in the other individual. In the latter 

 too the joints of the lower pinnules are sharply carinate. This is not the case in the 

 form with tubercular radials, which I find to be a small individual of Antedon milberti ; 

 and Grube's specific name leevissima will therefore only apply to the other specimen, 

 which I propose to describe more fully at a future time. 



Remarks. — The tubercular radials and the stout but rounded joints of the large lower 

 pinnules, together with the spiny cirri and the short arm -joints, thus combine to make 

 Antedon milberti an easily recognisable type. Although the second and third pairs of 

 pinnules are distinctly larger than the first, neither of them is especially characterised by 

 its greater size, as is the case in Antedon anceps and Antedon dubia (PI. XXXV. fig. 2 ; 

 PI. XXXVI. figs. 1, 4-6). Sometimes the one and sometimes the other is a little the 

 larger, while the third pair is occasionally nearly equal to the second, and in other 

 individuals considerably smaller, though always distinctly larger than its successor. 



The grouping of the syzygies in the arms is somewhat irregular. The second one is 

 very often on the eighth or ninth brachial, and is followed by another four joints after- 

 wards ; but in some arms the second syzygy does not come till the twelfth or thirteenth 

 joint. The examination of a large number of arms shows the syzygial interval to vary 

 from three to nineteen joints. It is usually from eight to ten in the middle and outer 

 parts of the arms, though somewhat less in their lower portions. 



In some individuals the axillaries and the lowest brachials have indications of 

 straight lateral edges and of the peculiar wall-sided character which has been described 

 above as distinctive of the Basicurva-groTxp. This is most marked in the specimen 

 obtained by the Challenger at Station 203, which differs frum all the other examples of 

 the type that I have seen in showing a considerable portion of the first radials externally. 

 Their length is more than half that of the second radials, and the tubercles which the 

 latter form with the pentagonal axillaries are less prominent than usual. Both joints 



1 Echinodernis. Comparison of the Tropical Faunae of the East and West Coasts of America, Trans. Connect. Acad. 

 Arts and Sci., 1867, vol. i. p. 341. 



2 Op. cit., p. 202. 3 53° Jahresber. der Schlesisch. Gesellsch.f. Vaterl. Cult., 1875, p. 74. 



