12 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



Weddell Sea (Sts. WS 552, 553, 555). At the same time it would not be safe to assume 

 its absence on so few records. 



I have unfortunately not been able to examine Pearcey's specimens,^ but there are a 

 few mounts by him in the Heron-Allen and Earland collection in the British Museum 

 (Natural History) which have proved interesting as paratypes. Of these a fragment of 

 Syringammina minuta is quite unidentifiable as a Foraminifer. A large and perfect 

 specimen referred to Technitella asciformis, and in general agreement with the figure of 

 the type, is certainly not a Technitella. The test appears to be chitinous, or perhaps 

 fibrous, without sponge spicules and not agglutinate. Its nature is obscure and I doubt 

 whether it is a Foraminifer at all. It may be an egg-sac of some organism. The specimens 

 of Reophax robustus are principally R. pilulifer, but a few resemble his figure and may 

 be regarded as Hormosina. The mounts of Hormosina irregularis are abnormal and dis- 

 torted individuals of H. globulifera. Haplophragmium umbilicatum is only a large and 

 coarsely-built form of Haplophragmoides rotulatus. 



The sixty-three species common to this report and to Pearcey's are, with few excep- 

 tions, deep-water cosmopolitans. His small total of eighty-three species indicates that 

 the Weddell Sea has not a particularly abundant or varied foraminiferal fauna, that the 

 majority are species of cosmopolitan deep-water character, and that his rare or new 

 species do not extend their range westward into the Bellingshausen and Scotia Seas, or 

 to the island groups in those seas. In short that, apart from such cosmopolitan species, 

 the Weddell Sea fauna has little in common with the fauna found to the west of a line 

 running from the extremity of Graham Land through the South Orkneys to the South 

 Sandwich Islands. This isolation of the Weddell Sea fauna would be accounted for if 

 there had been a separation of the two areas by a land surface within comparatively 

 recent geological times, as seems to be indicated by the lines of soundings confirming the 

 theory of the Scotia arc. Since the disappearance of this land barrier, the northward 

 sweep of the Weddell Sea current appears to have been sufficient to maintain the 

 isolation of the fauna, and to prevent the incursion of those warmer water species which 

 have established themselves to the westward of the old land barrier. There is practically 

 no evidence of Pacific influence, except the record of Technitella raphanus, to be found 

 in Pearcey's list, and none in the few Discovery records from the Weddell Sea. 



1 Pearcey's types and station slides from the 'Scotia' are apparently lost. I visited Edinburgh, 

 expecting to find them in the Royal Scottish Museum, where the collections made by the late 

 Dr W. S. Bruce are preserved, but after exhaustive search Dr A. C. Stephen was unable to find any 

 trace of the Foraminifera having been received with the other collections. Inquiry made in various quarters, 

 including the Bristol and Manchester Museums, where Pearcey had been employed, also failed to give any 

 trace. After Pearcey's death, Mr E. Heron-Allen purchased a small collection of Foraminifera from his 

 representatives, including some mounts from 'Scotia' stations, but they are obviously not the working 

 slides on which his report was compiled. It is thought that Pearcey may have disposed of the slides in 

 his lifetime to some collector or Museum, in which case it is to be hoped that they will eventually be 

 restored to their proper place in the Royal Scottish Museum. 



