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The Amphinomidae, Aphroditidae, Polynoidae, and 



Sigalionidse of Plymouth and the 



English Channel. 



By 

 T. V. Hodgson. 



Having attempted to investigate the Polych?Bte fauna of the Plymouth 

 district during those favourable opportunities which have occurred during 

 the past three years, I now put upon record some few notes respecting 

 a small section of this interesting but extremely perplexing group. 



The section under consideration is that treated of by Mcintosh in 

 his recently published Monograph (20). T have taken advantage of 

 that work to compile a synoptical table of the British species belonging 

 to those genera which are represented in the English Channel. 



The attention that I have been able to give to these Polychfetes has 

 not been what I could have wished, nor has it been anything like 

 adequate to exhaust the local species. I might therefore publish a 

 very incomplete list, or, by bringing into a compact form the records of 

 those species known to occur in the Channel in addition to a synoptical 

 table, I might be able to assist some future worker. I have adopted the 

 latter alternative. The synopsis has been diflicult to prepare, and that 

 difficulty has not been diminished by a complete ignorance of many of 

 the species included. Many are known only from single or even mutilated 

 specimens which have been obtained from the stomachs of fishes. 



One is rarely satisfied with definitions, generic or specific, and this 

 dissatisfaction becomes the more pronounced when comparisons have to 

 be made. In adopting the classification of Mcintosh an awkward 

 situation presents itself. The genus Polynoe, after undergoing numerous 

 fiuctuations, has, for the time at least, been divided into a number of 

 small but closely related genera. There are nine of these included in 

 the British fauna, distinguished by the possession of fifteen elytra. De 

 St. Joseph, in his Ann^lides PulycMtcs des cotes de Dinard, unites four 

 of these genera with others ; thus Harmothoe, Eunoa, Evarne, and 

 Antinoe are included in the single genus Harmothoe. I have allowed 

 the four new species described by that author to remain in the genus 

 Harmothoii without attempting to reduce them to the smaller genera 

 of Mcintosh, it being, in a paper of this kind, a matter of small 



