290 University of California Publications in Zoology  [Vou. 23 
Coe said (1910, p. 118): 
There can be no doubt that future collections will add materially to the 
number of... [nemerteans], whose range extends at least as far southward as 
Monterey Bay or even to Point Conception. And while this is a considerable 
range geographically, yet the environmental conditions of marine forms are not 
greatly different between Monterey Bay, Puget Sound, Sitka and the Eastern 
Aleutian Islands. The temperature of the water is but a few degrees different 
and in some seasons of the year is actually warmer on the coast in portions of 
Alaska than it is in Puget Sound, or even in the deeper water off the California 
coast. 
Furthermore, although his faunal districts do not seem to have 
been founded on any such basis, Verrill said of his west coast starfishes 
(1Ot4 ep. ao): 
The limits of distribution on that coast seem to be determined entirely by the 
temperature of the water, especially in the breeding season, due probably to the 
greater sensitiveness of the free-swimming larval forms. The adults can regulate 
their temperatures by migrating into deeper or shallower water as occasions 
require. 
As Ortmann anticipated, and Torrey and Coe more or less sue- 
cessfully demonstrated, there exists a comparative uniformity of 
temperature along a considerable part of the west coast, which permits 
the great latitudinal and intricately overlapping distribution of the 
marine organisms with which we are here concerned, and which is 
necessary to the establishment of our faunal area. 
North of Calfornia to the Aleutians is a vast stretch of coast 
which with the exception of isolated glacier fed bays is warmed much 
above the temperature normal to such latitudes. by the Kuro Siwo, the 
Japan current. This strikes the American coast in the neighborhood 
of Sitka where it separates into two streams, a northern, running up 
into the Gulf of Alaska and thence southeastward along the Alaska 
Peninsula into the eastern Aleutians, and a southern one which 
‘“broadens out and drifts slowly toward the equator, curving away 
from the coast.’’ 
South of Puget Sound to about Magdalena Bay is a region of 
almost equal extent which is cooled by an upwelling of cold abyssal 
water to a degree considerably below the normal expectation for its 
latitude.* The surface water along this section of the coast also 
exhibits a southward drift, and though it is known as the California 
4‘“Between the latitudes 45°...and 25°...the mean annual surface tempera- 
ture is progressively lower as the coast is approached. This fall in mean annual 
temperature is clearly indicated at every depth from 250 fathoms up to the 
surface, where there is an inshore temperature averaging 5° less than that found 
1,000 miles off-shore....The [appended] tables show that the off-shore surface 
temperatures at latitude 30° are much below the normal (the temperature given 
in the first column), while those at latitude 40° are somewhat greater, at least in 
