MUUH LEARNING 63 
from St. Helena was carefully described by Mr. Miers, who 
pointed out its resemblance to and differences from Xantho 
Bouvieri, A. Milne-Edwards, a species from the Cape Verd 
Islands. In 1886 Mr. Miers re-described it, and gave a 
figure of it in his ‘ Challenger Report,’ but he then placed it 
in a new sub-genus Huryozius, entitling it ‘ Pseudozius 
bouvieri, var. mellissii, in a hesitating manner identifying 
it with the species Xantho Bouvier: of A. Milne-Kdwards. 
In 1888 Professor Th. Barrois, in his catalogue of the 
marine Crustacea of the Azores, once more describes this 
species, and gives a beautiful figure of it in its natural 
colour of bright orange-red, with black tips to the cheli- 
peds. He and Mr. Miers are in exact agreement in their 
descriptions, as two such excellent naturalists were likely 
to be. But Professor Barrois calls the species Ozius 
Edwardsi, and explains that he had submitted it to the 
highly competent judgment of M. Alphonse Milne-Kdwards, 
who pronounced it to be a new Ozius, of which he had 
himself obtained a specimen at the Canaries during the 
expedition of the Zulisman. It will be consoling to the 
beginner and the amateur, when involved in perplexity 
amid species that they cannot name or can only name at 
random, to find the past masters of the science thus en- 
tangled as it were in their own web. For it must not be 
forgotten that Alphonse Milne-Edwards is acknowledged 
to be ‘the highest authority on the Brachyura,’! and yet he 
leads Barrois to make a new species of that which had 
been twice described and twice named by Miers, and which 
had probably been already named and described by Pro- 
fessor Milne-Edwards himself. The instance is significant 
of the stress, to which the highest powers must sometimes 
prove unequal, of keeping in mind each individual species 
of the vast multitude now known, and each individual 
chapter of the vast literature which records them. 
Barrois mentions an interesting peculiarity in this ele- 
gant crab. The carapace along the antero-lateral margins 
is obliquely striated on the under side with fine parallel 
grooves, in correspondence with which the fifth joint or 
* Miers, Challenger Report, p. 146. 
