406 Miscellaneous. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 

 Ad Historiam Cucumarice. By F. Jeffbey Bell. 



I. Cucumaria v. Fentacta. 

 In his valuable work ou the Echinodermata, now iu 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 Jilteren Namen Pentacta tiihren ; " and he goes 

 on with an enviable courage, " Der jiingere Xame Cacamnria ist 

 abet so allgemein in Gebrauch, dass er sich wohl nicht mehr 

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

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

 genoramen " Pentacta should replace Colochirus, for the sole type 

 given by Goldfuss (Zool. i. p. 177) is Actinia doliohim, which, as 

 Dr. v. Marenzeller (Abh. zool.-bot. Ges. Wien, xxiv. (187-1), p. 3U3) 

 has shown, is a Colochirus, 



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

 chirus has been in possession for nearly lialf a century : with some 

 systematists that fact may have weight. 



The statement of Prof. VerriU that "P. peata^tes, Jaeg., of 

 Europe is properly the type of the genus Pentacta '' rests upon a 

 misapprehension ; Jaeger himself says " Goldfuss hujus nominis 

 autor est,'' 



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

 suggestion that Pentacta should be used for the stichopodous and 

 Cucumaria for the sporadipodous species of ''Cu-urnaria'' of 

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

 remembered when he used Cucumaria in Verrill"s sense of Pentacta. 



II. On the Meaning of the Term '■'Lejleurilarde." 

 Among the many difficulties which surround the clear discrimiua- 

 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 eitlier, 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," " Yer radiaire du genre des holothuries,"' while ••fleurilarde " 

 is a " Zoophyte perdrigon violet tubcrculeux." Valmont-Bomarc 

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

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

 relle,' ed. 17*J1, vol. iii. p. 477, writes " Fleuri-larde," and he says, 

 " Le nom (|u'il (Dicquemare) a donno u cet animal en fait une sorte 

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

 cotes et au-dessous, au milieu de sa largeur, sont blaucs, ot pre- 

 sentent, a la forme pros, Tefivt d'un liovre larde on pique,' — 

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

 should bo 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. 



* Ob^erv. sur la riiv.«i(iiie. xii. (1778), p. 2*^3. 



