182 MISS A. CRANE ON A BRACHIOPOD [Apr. 6, 
desire, were presented to the nation) were removed to the Geological 
Department of the Natural History Branch of the British Museum 
at South Kensington, where he wished them to be deposited, Mr. 
Brazier’s series was found apart from the recent specimens with the 
fossil collection. Each species had been placed ina separate box 
with a number inside, and this number was found to correspond with 
Mr. Brazier’s list, which Dr. Davidson had copied into bis letter- 
book with his remarks appended. The executor instructed me 
temporarily to retain the series for examination. 
One very interesting new species of the remarkable genus Aéretia 
was discovered. This Dr. Davidson had named after his friend 
and correspondent Mr. John Brazier, of Sydney, who has dredged 
so extensively in Australian waters. The name 4Aéretia brazieri 
was attached in Dr. Davidson’s handwriting. The specimens 
are so excellent that there can be no possibility of generic error 
on my part, and I have therefore thought it my duty to publish 
a short description of Afretia brazier’, Dav., n. sp. MS., to secure 
priority for his last species, which should be figured in Part IT. of 
the Davidson Monograph of Recent Brachiopoda which I am now 
engaged in editing for the Transactions of the Linnean Society. 
Alretia, as its name implies, is an imperforate genus. It may be 
as well briefly to recapitulate the history of the type species, first 
published by Dr. Gwyn Jeffreys under the name Cryptopora gnomon 
in ‘Nature’ for Dec. 1869. In the ‘Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist.’ 
1876, Jeffreys gave the earliest description of the species, substituting 
the generic name Atretia for Cryplopora; Dr. Davidson gave the first 
figures in his Supplement to the “ Recent and Tertiary British 
Brachiopoda” (Pal. Soc. 1874), and again illustrated the species in one 
of the two plates he contributed to Dr. Jeffreys’s paper on “ The Mol- 
lusca (Brachiopoda) of the ‘ Lightning’ and ‘Porcupine’ Expeditions,” 
published in the Proc. Zool. Suc., April 1878.  Atretia gnomon 
was dredged off the west coast of Ireland in from 1380-1443 fws. ; 
during the ‘Valorous’ expedition, 1100-1750 fms., in Davis Straits. 
It was found by Dr. Friele (during the Norwegian Arctic expedition) 
about 30 miles W. of Tromsé, in 650 fms., ‘‘on the slope of the 
banks cold area.”’? It was dredged off Marocco and the Canaries at 
depths of 50-65 fms., by the‘ Talisman’ and French expeditions. In 
all more than fifty examples of the European representative of this 
well-marked Rhynchonelloid have been obtained by Jeffreys, Friele, 
and the Marquis de Folin. 
M. Eugéne Deslongchamps, in his ‘ Etudes Critiques sur des 
Brachiopodes nouveaux ou peu connus,’ p. 242 (Caen, 1884), 
expresses an opinion that déretia gnomon, Jeffr., is probably only a 
very young stage of R. psittacea, Chemn. But the recent discovery 
by Mr. Brazier of eleven good specimens of the genus Atrefia in 
the Southern Pacific Ocean, off the coast of New South Wales, tends 
to invalidate that assumption, the only Rhynchonelle in the 
Australian and Novo-Zelandian region being the deeply ribbed 
or furrowed RA. nigricans and its variety, 2. pyxidata, Boog- Watson. 
To these well-characterized forms Atretia braziert, smooth, flat, 
