i88 Records of the Indian Museum. [Vol. VI, 



[Mr. Cumming tells me that this species is very abundant in 

 the neighbourhood of Ouetta and is often seen crawling about in 

 bright sunlight. — N. A.] 



Gen. PoRCEiviviONiDES, Miers. 



1877. Porcellionides , Miers, Proc. Zool. Soc. London, p. 668. 

 1879. Metoponorthus, Budde-Lund, Prospectus I sop. terrestrium, 



p. 4. 

 1885. ,, ,, Crustacea Isopoda teyrestria, 



pp. 76, 161. 

 1898. ,, Sars, Crustacea of Norway, vol. ii, pt. 10, 



p. 183. 

 1904. ,, Budde-Lund, .4 Revision of '' Crust. I sop. 



terr.,''^ p. 37. 



Miers speaking of Porcellio, Latreille, remarks that de Saus- 

 sure " based the characters of his primary sections of this genus 

 on the form of the segments of the body." "These," he adds, 

 " appear to me at once so natural and so characteristic, that I 

 adopt them as subgeneric divisions." Miers accordingly distin- 

 guishes them as Porcellio, with '' Postero-lateral angles of all the 

 segments of the body acute, and produced backward," and Por- 

 cellionides, with " Postero-lateral angles of the first four segments 

 of the body not acute and not produced backward." To the 

 latter subgenus he assigns three new species with the names 

 jelskii, flavo-vittata, and hispida. The second of these is regarded 

 by Budde-Lund as certainly, and the first as doubtfully, synony- 

 mous with Porcellio pruinos24,s, Brandt, while the third may be a 

 synonym of Porcellio orientalis, Uljanin, both transferred by 

 Budde-Lund to his Metoponorthus. This makes it clear that the sub- 

 genus Porcellionides is the same as the subgenus Metoponorthus, 

 over which it has two years' priority. Why this has been uni- 

 formly^ disregarded is probably due in a large measure to Scud- 

 der's Nomenclator Zoologicus, 1882. That useful work mentions 

 Porcellionides of Milne- Edwards, 1840, and Porcellionides of 

 Miers, 1877, only indicating by a difference of type that the for- 

 mer was of higher than generic value. It is in fact a French 

 word used by Milne-Kdwards for his " Division des PorceUionides." 

 That authors were misled by the " Nomenclator ' is made the 

 more likely b}' the frequent use of M etoponorthrus which stands 

 in Scudder's work by mistake for Metoponorthus. Miers himself in 

 the " List of the species described " in his paper prints Porcel- 

 loides twice instead of Porcellionides, and as this is on p. 654, it 

 might be argued that Porcelloides has page precedence, but prac- 

 tically the list of species described must be regarded as later in 

 date than the descriptions. It is unfortunate that the significant 

 name Metoponorthus should have to be withdrawn, but it can 

 scarcely be pleaded either that the date 1877 belongs to a dim 

 antiquity or that the Proceedings of the Zoological Society are 

 obscure and inaccessible. 



