REVIEW. 
Histoire Naturelle des Annelés marins et d’eau douce. Anné- 
lides et Gephyriens. By ARMAND DE QUATREFAGES. 
THE worms of our seas and fresh waters—variously classi- 
fied and arranged by those who have studied them—have 
commanded till quite recently but a very poor share of the 
attention of the working naturalist. The probable reasons 
of this circumstance are to be found in the retiring nature 
of these animals, and the comparative obscurity of the 
characters which separate them specifically and generically, 
as well as the difficulty of tracing their life-histories and 
anatomical development. We believe that we are not 
exaggerating the true state of the case when we say that 
there is not a single work extant, such as is available for 
other .groups of animals, by which species of Annelida may 
be satisfactorily identified—even those occurring in such 
limited areas as our own and neighbouring seas. ‘The few 
systematic works which are to be had, of which the British 
Museum Catalogue published in 1865 may be taken as a 
specimen, are simply useless for the purposes of the present 
day, owing to insufficiency in details in both descriptions and 
figures. On the other hand, the work of M. Malmgren on 
the Annelids of the North Sea, and such descriptions of, 
species and ample drawings as those of Kinberg* and \— 
Ehlers,+ are examples of the manner in which the Annelida ~. 
should be treated; and until we get such works from many ~~ 
different localities the synonymy must remain in its present 
shocking condition, very many species which bear the same 
name in France, England, Germany, and Scandinavia, being 
quite distinct, and those bearing different names being often 
identical, 
* FEugenie’s Resa, &c., Zoologi, 1857. 
+ ‘Die Borstenwiirmer,’ 1864. 
