NORTH AMERICAN EARTHWORMS OF THE FAMILY LUM- 

 BRICIDAE IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES 

 NATIONAL MUSEUM. 



By Frank Smith, 



Professor of Systematic. Zoology, University of Illinois. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The classification of earthworms in common use at the present 

 time recognizes four f amihes of wliich three are represented in North 

 America. The piesent paper deals with the family Lumbricidae, 

 which is chiefly represented in Europe and Western Asia where it 

 presumably originated. North America has scarcely a dozen indige- 

 nous species of this family as yet described and but a slightly larger 

 number of species that are also found in the Eurasian region. A 

 considerable number of the latter have probably been introduced 

 into North America thi'ough the agency of European settlers. Tlie 

 earthworms which are most characteristic of the North American 

 region belong to the famihes Megascolecidae and Geoscolecidae and 

 win be dealt with in a subsequent paper. 



The systematic literature on North American Lumbricidae is 

 decidedly meager. Eisen was the pioneer in this field, and in 1874 

 listed nine species of which four were described as new. These spe- 

 cies were recorded as from Mount Lebanon, New England, and from 

 Niagara, Canada. Correspondence with Doctor Eisen has brought 

 out the fact that the Mount Lebanon mentioned is really in the 

 eastern part of the State of New York. Michaelsen described two 

 new species from Georgia and Florida in 1894 and one from North 

 Carohna in 1910, and in 1900 published an important paper dealing 

 with the distribution and relationships of the lumbricid fauna of 

 North America. Ude described a new species from Georgia in 1895, 

 and H. F. Moore in the same year described a new species from 

 Pennsylvania for which he had in 1893 described the new genus 

 Bimastos. Finally, Smith and Gittins described two new Illinois 

 species in 1915, and in the same year Smith pubhshed the descrip- 

 tion of a new variety together with a list of the species found in 

 Ilhnois. 



Proceedings U. S. National Museum, Vol. 52— No. 2174. 



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