18 MR. E.J. MIERS ON CRUSTACEA FROM [Jan. 14, 



3. On a Collection of Crustacea made by Capt. H. C. St. John, 

 R.N., in the Corean and Japanese Seas. By Edward 

 J. MiERS, F.L.S., F.'Z.S.— Part I. Podophthalmia. 

 With an Appendix by Capt. H. C. St. John. 

 [E«ceiTed November 23, 1878.] 

 (Plates I.-III.) 



The collections of Crustacea made by Capt. H. C. St. John while 

 engaged in surveying the Japanese coasts between the years 1870 

 and 1877 have "been presented by Dr. J. Gwyn Jeffreys, F.R.S., to 

 the Trustees of the British iluseum, and are of so much interest, 

 both from the geographical distribution of the species and on account 

 of the many novelties collected, that I have thought it desirable to 

 bring an account of them before the Society. The specimens were 

 nearly all obtained by dredging ; and Capt. St. John has furnished 

 an interesting account of the mode adopted by him in collecting and 

 separating the specimens, which is printed below as an Appendix. 

 But few of the larger and well-known littoral species, which are so 

 well described and figured by De Haan in his standard work upon 

 the Crustacea of Japan (in Siebold, 'Fauna Japonica,' 1833-50), are 

 represented in the collection. 



Comparatively little was known of the Crustacean fauna of the 

 deeper waters of this region until the publication, in 1857-60, of a 

 series of papers by the late Dr. W. Stimpson, the eminent American 

 carcinologist, on the Decapoda collected by the U.S. Expedition to 

 the North Pacific under Commanders C. Ringgold and J. Rodgers, 

 in the ' Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences,' which 

 contain short L^tin diagnoses of a large number of new species 

 (many of them obtained at considerable depths), and in which also 

 a considerable number of species previously described by Milne- 

 Edwards, Dana, Adams and White, and others are added to the 

 Japanese fauna. It is much to be regretted that no fuller account 

 of these collections should ever have appeared, and that Stimpson's 

 preliminary report did not extend beyond the Decapoda. As Capt. 

 St. John's collections were made in the same region, many of Stimp- 

 son's species occur in them ; and in their determination I have been 

 greatly aided by comparing them with a series of specimens from the 

 Japanese Seas, named by Dr. Stimpson himself, and presented some 

 years ago by the Smithsonian Institution to the British Museum. 



It is remarkable, under the circumstances, that the present collec- 

 tion should contain so many forms which are new to science, while 

 so many of Stimpson's species stUl remain desiderata to the national 

 collection ; and this goes far to prove that a rich harvest will yet 

 reward the collector of marine Invertebrata in the Japanese region, 

 and that even more interesting results may be expected in many 

 regions where no dredging-operations have yet been attempted. The 



