AUTICLE XIV.-HYDROMEDUSAE AND SCYPHOMKDUSAE FROM 

 THE AUCKLAND AND CAMFHEEL ISLANDS. 



By W. B. Benham, D.Sc., F.R.S., University of Otago. 



PLATE XII. 



As special attention was paid to terrestrial forms of life during this expedition, and 

 no apparatus for exploring the surface or depths of the sea was taken, the four 

 medusae enumerated below may be regarded as merely incidental acquisitions. 

 They are, nevertheless, of interest, for little work has been done on either of the 

 groups. It is true that Coughtrey, Hilgendorf, and Farquhar have studied the 

 hydroids of the New Zealand coast, and Filhol collected a few at Campbell Island, 

 but in none of their articles is there any reference to the medusae. As to the Scypho- 

 medusae, no work at all has been done on even the common species which occur off 

 the shores of the Dominion, though Haeckel describes five species from deep water, 

 obtained during the voyage of the " Challenger " in the neighbourhood of New 

 Zealand. It is thus a new field, and one to be recommended to students having 

 any love for beauty or elegance of form. But, while including these four species 

 in this report, they teach us but little or nothing of importance in regard to the 

 problem of former land connections, for although Hippocrene is the gonozooid of 

 BougainvUlea, which is a littoral hydroid, it, like the other three, is pelagic, and 

 hence may be of wide distribution. It is particularly interesting, however, to come 

 across a species of the subantarctic genus Phialella, the only other species to which I 

 can find a reference having been obtained at the Falkland Islands during the recent 

 Scottish Antarctic Expedition. 



I have refrained from giving specific names to the two Hydromedusae, as I have 

 little of the recent literature on the group. Similar forms may have been met with 

 during the various expeditions to the Antarctic, but those of the "Discovery" have 

 not yet been published, and the reports of the foreign expeditions to these seas are 

 not available in the Dominion. 



aass HYDROMEDUSAE. 

 Order ANTHOMEDUSAE. 

 Fam, Margelidae. 

 Hippocrene, Mertens, 1829. (Plate XII, figs. 1, 2.) 



While passing up Musgrave Harbour the boat sailed through a shoal of these 

 beautiful little medusae. 



The umbrella is much arched, quadrate in section, with rounded exumbrella. 

 At each angle is a U-shaped white thickened cushion bearing numerous long fila- 

 mentous tentacles, nearly as long as the height of the umbrella ; at their bases are 

 numerous red ocelli. 



