182 A VIVIPAROUS AUSTRALIAN PERIPATUS, 



p. 31 ; and Zoologischer Anzeiger, December 28th, 1891] Dr. 

 Dendy has announced the discovery that P. leuckartii — meaning 

 thereby any Australian Peripatus which is not referable to the 

 28-legged F. insignis — is oviparous, that until he made this 

 discovery nobody, more particularly myself,f knew anything about 

 its mode of reproduction, and that it appears from my observa- 

 tions that the young are hatched in October. If all or any of 

 this be correct, then of course the object given to me by Professor 

 Haswell and referred to above as an embryo, is not and cannot be 

 such, but it must be considered to be a yolk granule — a yolk 

 granule with a pair of rudimentary antennae, and fifteen pairs of 

 developing walking legs, but only a yolk granule, however 

 remarkable, nevertheless ! For since Dr. Dendy describes the 

 deposited eggs of P. leuckartii as consisting of " milky fluid 

 contents containing very many yolk granules, but with no appear- 

 ance of an embryo," it is obviously impossible that advanced 

 embryos could be present in younger (intra-uterine) ova of such 

 an animal. 



Clearly, therefore. Dr. Dendy would have done well either 

 to have confined his remarks entirely to the mode of reproduc- 

 tion of the Victorian Peripatus, or else to have been quite sure 

 of his ground. Because as set forth in his four papers Dr. Dendy 

 has committed himself to definite statements about Peripatus 

 leuckartii which when applied to the New South Wales Peripatus 

 are simply preposterous ; and when they are applied to the 

 Victorian Peripatus are found, in view of subsequently ascertained 

 facts, to be in need of so much limitation and qualification that 

 when they come to be soberly restated in a modified form they 

 may well be excused from knowing themselves when placed beside 



t In three of Dr. Dendy's papers I am referred to as " the only observer, 

 so far as I am aware, who has said anything of its [P. leuckartii] hfe- 

 history." Of course I knew nothing, because prior to July 31st, lo91, 

 " nothing [was] knovvn of its [P. leuckartii] mode of reproduction " ; what 

 there was to know was that P. leuckartii was oviparous and differed 

 widely, &c. I have never said a word in the past on the subject of the 

 life-history of any but N.S.W. specimens of P. leuckartii ; and what I said 

 about these was quite in order. 



