406 Miscellaneous. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 

 Ad Historiam Oucumarice. By F. Jeffrey Bell. 



I. Cucumaria v. Fentacta. 

 In his valuable work ou the Echinodermata, now in course of publi- 

 cation as part of Bronn's ' Klassen u. Ordnungen,' Prof. Ludwig 

 remarks as a footnote to Cucumaria, " Streng genommen musste 

 diese Gattung den iilteren Namen Fentacta fiihren ; " and he goes 

 on with an enviable courage, " Der jiingere Name Cucumaria ist 

 aber so allgemein in Gebrauch, dass er sich wohl uicht mehr 

 wird verdriingen lassen." It is well, however, to be right at law 

 as well as in equity, and I may therefore point out that " streng- 

 genoraraen " Fentacta should replace Colochirus, for the sole type 

 given by Goldfuss (Zool. i. j). 177) is Actinia doliolum, which, as 

 Dr. V. Marenzeller (Abh. zool. -hot. Ges. Wien, xxiv. (1874), p. 303) 

 has shown, is a Colochirus. 



Cucumaria, then, is not to be displaced. I may add that Colo- 

 chirus has been in possession for nearly half a century ; with some 

 systematists that fact may have weight. 



The statement of Prof. Verrill that "P. pentactes, Jaeg., of 

 Europe is properly the type of the genus Fentacta " rests upon a 

 misapprehension ; Jaeger himself says " Goldf ass hujus nominis 

 autor est.'" 



This correction will take us further, for it disposes of VerrilTs 

 suggestion that Fentacta should be used for the stichopodous and 

 Cucumaria for the sporadipodous species of ^'■Cucumaria"' of 

 authors — a suggestion which, by the way. Dr. Lampert should have 

 remembered when he used Cucumaria in Verrill's sense of Fentacta. 



II, On the Meanhui of the Term "Lejleurilarde." 

 Among the many difficulties which surround the clear discrimina- 

 tion of Cucumaria pentactes is the meaning of Dicquemare's " Le 

 fleurilarde " *. Since his time it is only rarely that the term has 

 been correctly -given, his " le fleurilarde" being written " la fleuri- 

 larde " by Cuvier and Lamarck and " Tholothurie fleurillade " by 

 de Blaiuville. The compilers of French dictionaries have either, as 

 is also the case with Littre and the French Academy, omitted the 

 word, or, as in the Diet, des diet, and the Diet, nation., have " fleuri- 

 barde," " Ver radiaire du genre des holothuries," while "fleurilarde " 

 is a " Zoophyte perdrigon violet tuberculeux." Valmont-Bomare 

 (to whose work I was referred by my former colleague Professor 

 Mariette), in his ' Dictionnaire raisoune universel d'hisroire natu- 

 relle,' ed. 1791, vol. iii. p. 477, writes " Fleuri-larde," and he says, 

 " Le nom qu'il (Dicquemare) a donne a cet animal en fait une sorte 

 de description . . . les trois doubles rangs des pieds qui sent aux 

 cotes et au-dessous, au milieu de sa largeur, sent blancs, et pre- 

 sentent, a la forme pres, Teft'et d'un lievre larde ou pique," — 

 which is, after all, but a quotation from the original description. I 

 should be glad to hear of any other references to the name ; the 

 very considerable search I have made myself has had no more 

 result than this. 



* Observ. sur la Physique, xii. (1778), p. 283. 



