INTRODUCTION. 



„// seems to me most desirable that minute, 

 and even apparently trivial, features should 

 he given in the descriptions of species". 



C Stewart* 



This work is not 



a monograph; the 



reasons for this. 



In the present work there has been collected under the title ol ,,S t u dies o n ni a r i n e 

 O s t r a c o d s", Part I a part of the results that have proceeded from the investigations that I 

 have carried out during the last few years on the marine representatives of the O s t r a c o d s, 

 a group of Crustacea which is in many respects particularly interesting, both to the zoologist 

 and the geologist. 



One criticism that may possibly be made against this work is that although it is rather 

 voluminous, it has not the form of a monograph; a number of the many problems presented 

 by the marine Ostracods have been left quite untouched, and my efforts have been con- 

 centrated on others — some of them very lieterogeneous in their nature. 



1 must readily admit the justice of this criticism. The type of the w'ork seems anything 

 but satisfactory to myself. It is, as the title itself shows, a conglomeration; some of its integral 

 parts are quite independent of each other. 



Although the marine Ostracods have been treated by a number of investigators 

 in a comparatively large number of works, it may be said not without justification that, on 

 account of the uncertainty and superficiality that characterizes the great majority of these 

 works, they constitute a subject that in many respects is almost entirely unknown. Under 

 these circumstances it would of course have been most convenient to have directed these studies 

 on a smaller systematic unit, for instance one family or even one genus, and to have submitted 

 this to a fundamental and comprehensive examination or to have examined the Ostracod 

 group as a whole from the point of view of a limited problem. In this way a result that was 

 more favourable in many respects might certainly have been obtained and at the same time 

 tlie treatise might have been more homogeneous from a structural point of view, a real miit. 



As a matter of fact this was the direction I intended at first to take. Mv first studies 

 were concentrated on the C y p r i d i n i d s and II ;i I o <• v |m- i d s. 



* .1. K. MiiTdsc. Soi-. Lnmloii, 1880. 



