380 Ml'. G. Lewis on 



contained;" he terms the bh)od-corpuscles siinplj '' uiiicelliilar 

 movable glands," and, with reference to the chemical nature of 

 the secretion, " globulin-containing- albumen-glands." In the 

 second place, so far as can be judged from his publication, 

 Loewit only examined the blood which tlowed from a wound 

 on the body or which was drawn u]) from between the organs 

 by a pipette ; it is consequently a permissible hypothesis that 

 centres for the regeneration of blood-corpuscles exist in the 

 crayfish as in the Insects (see p. 213 of this volume of the 

 ' Binlogisches (^entralblatt '), which, from a physiological 

 standpoint, would be comparable to the lym[)hatic glands of 

 Vertebrates, and in whicli the division of the cells may take 

 ])lace by mitosis. If this is the case it does not appear 

 lemarkable that amitotic nuclear division occurs in the blood- 

 corpuscles circulating in the body, which, indeed, have an 

 assimilating and a secretory function. A short time ago 

 Cudnot (Archives de Zoologie, exp. et g6n. 1" serie, t. ix., 

 1891, pp, 78 and 83) observed in the crayfish in the gills and 

 in the neighbourhood of the heart " glandes lymphatiques,'' 

 which he regards as the centres for the regeneration of the 

 blood-corpuscles. I believe therefore that it has not been 

 conclusively proved by Jjoewit's investigations that a 

 *' regenerative " amitotic nuclear division exists. I may 

 incidentally remark that Dr. vom Rath has shown me a series 

 of sections of a young fish-louse ( C_y'«of/^oa., sp., from Naples, 

 5 millim. long', in which mitotic division of blood-corpuscles 

 was abundantly visible. 



XLIX. — On new Species o/"Iiisterida3. By George Lewis. 



This paper is the seventh of a series published in this Maga- 

 zine on the Histeridge, and in the fifth memoir, that of June 

 1885, the estimate of known species was given as lJ-85j 

 which included those given in the Munich Catalogue and in 

 Schmidt's List oi' 1884. Since this assessment was made 

 nearly 450 species iiave been noticed by various authors ; but 

 these figures include those of this paper and 16 of a paper in 

 tb.e press recording new species from Burma h, and do not 

 note any reduction in tlie general number which may iiave 

 arisen through the adjustment of the synonymy. Taking the 

 total, then, as it stands now at 1850 species, it cannot be said, as 

 regar<ls their present numbers, that the Histeridte are a very 

 important family in the Coleoptera j but there are several 



