No. 7. — Studies from the Newport Marine Zoological Laboratory. 

 Communicated hy Alexander Agassiz. 



XIX. 



Oil Certain Medusa from New England. By J, Walter Fewkes. 



The following paper is intended as a contribution to our knowledge of 

 New England jelly-fishes. It deals for the most part with animals of 

 this group from the northern Avaters of the coast of Maine, and from 

 Grand Manan.* During a vacation visit of a month's time at the latter 

 locality, in the summer of 1886, the author collected several new and 

 highly interesting medusae, t Incidentally, in studies of animals of 

 other groups in the summer of 1885, some observations were made on 

 Eastport medusse. 



* "While the waters of the Gulf Stream justly attract the attention of natural- 

 ists interested in the study of our pelagic fauna, there is niucli yet ^o be done with 

 the dip-net in the cold waters of the Bay of Fundy and the coasts of Nova Scotia 

 and New Brunswick. 



t Mention is made in these pages of those medusae only which were collected 

 by the author, and no attempt is made to include all tliose mentioned by others. 



It is next to impossible to make out a complete faunal list of the medusae of any 

 locality, except after years of study. From the nature of their life, stragglers and 

 sporadic swarms of rare medusae appear in localities where the medusan fauna 

 has been well studied. For ten years I have kept watch of tlie medusae which 

 appear in Narragansett Bay in summer months, and a season rarely passes in 

 which some jelly-fish new to the known fauna is not observed. Sometimes 

 specimens of some new genus will appear in such abundance that it seems im- 

 possible that we could have missed seeing them if they had appeared in other 

 summers. In some years the water near the Newport Laboratory is filled with 

 Pleurobracliiae, wliile in others stragglers only appear. In the past summer the 

 most common acaleph in Narragansett Bay was Dautylometra, hundreds of speci- 

 mens of which were seen, and yet in former summers we rarely have observed 

 more than a half-dozen in the course of a summer. 



In tlie light of these facts it seems preposterous to attempt a monograph of the 

 medusae of the Bay of Fundy witii the limited material collected on the short 

 visits which I have been able to make to these waters. 



VOL. XIII. — NO. 7. 14 



