62 " ENDEAVOUR " SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 



Whether the genus Kirchenjpaueria is sufficiently distinct or 

 whether nil the species should, as Billard suggests, be referred to 

 Phvmularia, is a question which I leave to others to determine, 

 though the fact that these few species agree among themselves 

 and differ from all the other forms of Plumularia in such 

 important characters, must have some weight. To one feature 

 however, — the form of the anterior sarcothecse — I attach no 

 importance. They are — in K. producta and K. mirabilis — 

 merely the ordinary fixed anterior sai'cotheca?, modified by the 

 terminal locnlus being very widely expanded and very shallow ; in 

 short, they are saucer-shaped rather than cup-shaped. Jickeli 

 calls them dish-shaped continuations of the perisarc. Moreover 

 they vary, and I have seen them in K. producta scarcely 

 differing from the ordinary form found in such species as 

 P. campanula. In the case for the retention of the genus it is 

 doubtless a weak point that it rests on the concurrence of two 

 distinct features — the presence of naked sarcostyles and the 

 absence of the supracalycine nematophores — and that there 

 appears to be no necessary reason why these characteristics 

 should always be found associated, as however, the}' are in all 

 the species yet known. 



Loc. — Bass Strait. 



