POLYCHAETE WORMS, PART 1 5 



Bay of Fundy from P. Brunei and others from the Station de Bio- 

 logie Marine, Grande-Riviere, E. L. Bousfield from the National 

 Museum of Canada, from the Nova Scotia Museum of vScicnce, and 

 the Royal Ontario Museum of Science; material from Mr. John L. 

 Taylor, from Seahorse Key, Florida. 



(3) Collections in the U.S. National Museum. Nearly 3 years 

 were spent at the Museum, working over the material referred to 

 above and examining comparative material. In addition to the valu- 

 able cataloged and type specimens deposited in the Museum, a good 

 deal of unidentified material from various sources was available for 

 study, including some collected by the U.S. Fish Commission vessels 

 Albatross and Fish Hawk off the east coast of North America, chiefly 

 between 1883 and 1921 ; these collections had been only partly worked 

 up by A. E. Verrill, A. L. Treadwell, J. Percy Moore, and others. 



The polychaete taxonomy has been revised to a limited extent. 

 For each genus, the original reference and type species are given and 

 have been checked, except for those indicated as "not seen" in the 

 list of references. Among the factors causing particular confusion in 

 polychaete taxonomy, as with many other groups, are the continued 

 use of a generic name even though preoccupied, the use of a generic 

 name in a different sense from that indicated by the type species, the 

 type designation of a species not mcluded when the genus was pro- 

 posed, use of a different spelling from the original, and failure to use 

 the name of the oldest synon3^m. 



As a result of this first part of the study, 12 new species are described 

 (Pettibone, 1955, 1956b, 1957a-c), and a new family, Paralacydoniidae, 

 and a new family name, Trochochaetidae (=Disomidae), are proposed. 

 Part I includes 183 species belonging to 29 families. In order to 

 facilitate identification, keys to the families, genera, and species are 

 given, as weU as synopses of the families. All species are figured in 

 part. Most of the illustrations were drawn under the writer's dh^ec- 

 tion, many of them from living material, by Mrs. Marie Litterer. 

 Figures 1 and 2 were drawn by Mr. Lawrence Isham. Some figures 

 were prepared from the writer's sketches and some from the unpub- 

 lished manuscript of J. Percy Moore. An explanatory key to the 

 lettering on the figures is given on page 6. The synonymies listed 

 are by no means complete, but they bring together the important 

 references to additional descriptions and figures and to ecological, 

 embryological, and distributional references and records. The treat- 

 ment otherwise includes a brief description of each species, notes on 

 the biology of most of the species, an indication of the material 

 examined, and the known geogi'aphic and bathymetric limits of each 

 species. 



