oo 



BY VERA IRWI.V-SMITH. 493 



Statistics given by tiie early hclmintliologists show what was known, at the 

 time of writinc'. of the clistribution of the speeies among the various hosts. It 

 is summarised here in tabulated fonii. 

 Total number 

 Author of known spp Distribution. 



of hosts. , ' — ■ , 



Rudolphi (1819) ... 7 1 mammal 



Diesins; (1851) .... 53 12 



Molin (1860) 73 



Stossich (1889) .. .. 104 



Molin states that of the 73 hosts which he recorded, only eiijht were Euro- 

 pean, the remainina; sixty five beino; exotic, the majority of them American. 

 Twenty nine years later, Stossich gives the distribution of recorded species of 

 Physaloptera a-s 7 in Europe, 4 in Asia. 1 in Africa, and 28 in America. 



Diesing in 1851 had included 13 species in the genus, four of which he 

 regarded as doubtful ; Molin enumerated 22, after excluding four of Diesing's 

 species, and including four doubtful ones; Linstow (1878) recorded 31 species, 

 ,and Stossich (1889) 37, eleven of them doubtful. Of these thirty seven, 15 

 were found in mammals, 11 in birds, and 11 in reptiles. Between 1889 and 

 1906 eighteen new species were catalogued in the Zoological Record. This 

 brouglit the total number of recorded species up to 55, of which 25 occurred 

 in mammals, 14 in birds, 15 in reptiles, and 1 in an amphibian. This number, 

 of course, includes doul)tful species. Linstow at this date (1906) gives the 

 number as 20 in mammals, 12 in birds, and 14 in reptiles. Twenty one new 

 species appear in the Zoological Record l>etween 1906 and 1918, and the total 

 number of specific names recorded altogether, up to the end of 1918 is seventy 

 seven, 34 in mammals, 18 in birds, 24 in reptiles, and 1 in a frog. The com- 

 plete list is given on p. 494, with dates of those species which were proposed as 

 new after the appearance of Stossieh's monograph. 



On the species parasitic in Reptiles. 



Of Rudoljjhi's original species, two, P. abbreviata and P. retiisa, were found 

 in reptiles, both of them in lizards, and until the appearance of Diesing's Syst. 

 Helm, in 1851, these were still the only species known from this cla.ss. Diesing 

 described as a third species, P. mucronata, from the alligator, and placed 

 Rudoliihi's Sf ronijt/his colubri in the same genus, .among the "species inquirendae," 

 but Molin c<iiisidered P. mucronata to be an Ascarid, and subsequent writers 

 follow him in excluding it from the list of Physaloptera. In 1882, Drasehe 

 examined and published a revision of the t})']>es of Diesmg's and Molin's 

 species, and pronounced P. mucronata to be a synonym of Ascaris lanc>folata 

 Molin; but he included P. colubri as a valid speeies. Three other of the early 

 species, all Leidy's, /'. abjecta, P. constricta, and P. contorta, are insufficiently 

 characterised, and are regarded by both Molin and Stossich as doubtful species. 

 Of the other species wliich make up the list of eleven recorded by Stossich, two 

 were added by Molin, one, P. spiralis, by Schneider in 1860, and two, P. dey>tn1a, 

 and P. striata, by Linstow in 1883. 



The number of species recorded from rei)tiles has been more than doubled 

 since that time, but no complete review of the whole group lias been published 

 since the date of Stossieh's monograph. The amount of work now involved in 

 the search through scattered literature before any systematic work can be 

 undertaken, makes such a review urgently necessary. 



Although Plu/saloptera has been met with fairly frequently in Australian 

 reptiles, and is known to be widely distributed, only two definite specific records 



