144 ]\Ir. H. A. Baylis on 



VIII. — On Crassicauda crassicauda {Crepl.) [JS^emafoda] 

 and its Hosts. By H. A. Baylis, B.A. 



(Published by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.) 



On July 18tli, 1915, an example of the rare Cuvier^s whale 

 {Zipliius cavirostris) was found stranded on the coast of 

 Ireland near the entrance to Bannow Bay, Co. Wexford, 

 This whale has recently been reported upon by Dr. S. F. 

 Harmer *. During its dissection by members of the staff of 

 the British Museum, a ))ortion of a Nematode worm was 

 found in the neighbourhood of the kidneys, having evidently 

 been pulled out of the renal tubules. This fragmentary 

 specimen was handed to me for examination, and proves to 

 be of interest on grounds which will be mentioned in this 

 paper. 



Although the specimen is incomplete, and I have been 

 unable to decide to which sex it belongs, it seems almost 

 certainly to be an example of the curious Filaria-Vike form 

 originally described by Creplin f iu 1829, under the name of 

 Filaria crassicauda, and lately redescribed in part by Lei per 

 and Atkinson \, who have created for it the new genus 

 Crassicauda. 



There seems to be some doubt as to the species of whale 

 from which Creplin's original material was obtained. This 

 was a whale stranded on the isl;\nd of Riigen, in the Baltic, 

 in 1825, According to the opinion of Rosenthal and Horns- 

 chuch §, who described the whale, it was of the same species 

 as the ^'' Balcena minima seu rostrata^^ of Fabricius ||. This, 

 according to True^, is in all probability the species now more 

 correctly known as Balcenoptera acuto-rostrata, Lacep. 

 Miinter **j however, who examined the skeleton of the same 

 specimen, refers it to the blue whale, Balcenojytera musculus, L. 

 \_-=B. sibhahlii, auctt., nee B. musculus, auctt.]. Dr. S. F. 

 Harmer, who has kindly given me the benefit of his know- 



* Abstr. of Proceedings Zool. Soc. 1915, no. 148, p. 42. 



t Verb. d. K. Leop.-Carol. Ak. d. Naturf. xiv. 2 Abth. 1829, p. 873. 



X ' Terra Nova ' Report, Zoology, vol. ii. no. 3, Parasitic Worms 

 (1915), p. 29. 



§ ' Epistola de Balcenopteris quibusdam ventre sulcato distinctis &c.,' 

 Gryphife, 1825. 



II 0. Fabricius, ' Fauna Groeulandica,' 1780, p. 40. 



^ F. W. True, " On the Nomenclature of the Whalebone Whales of 

 the Tenth Edition of Linnaeus' ' Svstema Naturte.'" Proc. U.S. Nat. 

 Mus. xxi. (1898) pp. 617-635. 



** Mitth. naturwiss. Ver. Neu-Vorpommern u. Riigen, ix, Jahrg. 1877 

 (Berlin), p. 1. 



