1889.] DIFFERENT SPECIES OF OTTER. 193 
present species Barangia sumatrana, from the original locality of 
Raffles’s specimen, and thus making the latter individual the type of 
the species. This “‘Barangia sumatrana”’ being, as Dr. Anderson 
has pointed out, the first unused binomial name applied to the 
species, it must stand as “ LZ. sumatrana, Gray ”?. 
Lastly, for species D, the little clawless Otter, a different name to 
the well-known ‘‘L. deptonyx’’ most unfortunately has the priority. 
In the ‘Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap’ for 
1780° Baron F. vy. Wurmb gave a description of an Otter found 
near Batavia which he called the ‘ Grijze Otter,” and to this “Grey 
Otter’’ Illiger in 1811 applied the name of Lutra cinerea” *. This 
name has never been referred to except incidentally among the 
synonyms of Lutra leptonyx, and even then it is usually without 
any particulars as to date or place of publication. 
The reference of L. cinerea to L. leptonyx is unfortunately correct 
without a shadow of doubt, since in his accounts of the ** Grijze 
Otter,” Baron v. Wurmb mentions among other things that it has 
“‘ronde nagels” and is only 1 foot 6 inches long, with a tail 1 foot 
in length, two characters that connect it with L. leptonyzx alone of 
all Otters. Again, Horsfield in his original account of L. leptonyx* 
himself quotes v. Wurmb’s “ Grijze Otter” as a synonym, without 
knowing that 14 years before a Latin name, L. cinerea, had been 
applied to it, which name antedated then and must, I am afraid, 
supersede now the better-known “ LZ. leptonyx.” That the “ Grijze 
Otter” is the same as L. leptonyz is also proved by the fact that no 
other species of the genus is as yet known to inhabit Java, unless 
the very different sharp-clawed L. darang should after all be found 
to occur there. 
Of the names now looked upon as synonyms of one or other of 
‘the above four species, the following require some explanation :— 
(1) Lutra aurobrunnea, Hodgs. J. A. 8. B. viii. p. 320 (1839). 
(2) Barangia (?) nepalensis, Gray, P.Z.S. 1865, p. 124; Cat. 
Carn. B. M. p. 101 (1869). 
The type of the first of these descriptions is a distorted and dyed 
‘skin, and that of the second an incomplete skull. Both were pre- 
sented to the Museum by Mr. B. H. Hodgson along with his 
Nepalese collection, and, as suggested both by Anderson and Blanford, 
perhaps belong to the same individual. 
The skin (Z. aurobrunnea, Hodgs.) is, I feel sure, that of an 
example of L. vulgaris, as is shown, in spite of its distorted muzzle, 
by the sharply-detined limit of the hair growing below the nostrils, 
where in hairy-nosed Otters (to which the species has been said to 
be allied) there is no such exact limit. The feet, again, so far as it 
? It may be noted here that Lutra paleindica, Fale. and Cautl., from the 
Siwaliks of N. India, proves, on a direct comparison of the type, to be almost 
indistinguishable from L. sumatrana. 
* Vol. ii. p. 285 of the 3rd edition, published 1826, 
* Abh. Ak. Berl. 1811, p. 99 (published 1815), 
* Zool. Researches in Java, 1824. 
