New System o/" Chalininse. 327 



collection, which is now in the possession of the British 

 Museum, includes 153 species (and varieties), of which 131 

 are new, and that the number of known Chalininge is thereby 

 increased from 96 to 227. The author possessed good spirit- 

 material of 54 species, so that he was enabled to study care- 

 fully the structure of individual representatives of the different 

 groups. Under these circumstances he has found it necessary 

 to create a new system of Chalininse. 



The main body of the paper is divided into four sections : — 

 " I. J\l orphologie der Chalinidas ; II. Das System der Chali- 

 nin^ ; III. Die geographische Verbreitung der Chalinidaj ; 

 IV. Die australischen Chalininge." 



I. The Morphology of the Chalininse. 



I naturally consider the morphological section to be of the 

 greatest general interest, and I can but wish that it were a 

 little longer. One or two statements call for special remark. 



On page 726 we find the sentence " Es ist keine incrusti- 

 rende Chalinide bekannt." In view of the facts of the case 

 this seems to be a rather hasty generalization. In our Pre- 

 liminary Report on the Monaxonida of the ' Challenger ' 

 Expedition, published in this journal in 1886, Mr. E,idley 

 and I have described an incrusting species of Chalina under 

 the name Chalina rectangularis, and our specific diagnosis 

 commences with the words " Incrusting, thin, with low 

 mound-like prominences, each bearing a vent " *. Dr. von 

 Lendenfeld, however, surmounts this difficulty in rather a 

 novel fashion, namely by placing Chalina rectangularisy. 

 Hidley and Dendy, in a genus of his own, Dactylochalina, 

 which he characterizes as " dickfingrig " (!), wherein our 

 incrasting Chalina appears under the name '' Dactylochalina 

 rectangularis Lendenfeld." But there is another difficulty 

 which is not so easily got over, and that is that the author 

 himself describes on p. 823 of the work under consideration 

 a new species under the name " Hoplochalina incrustans 

 n. sp.," the diagnosis of which commences with the words 

 " Klein, incrustirend, 4 mm. hoch " I 



Any detailed information with regard to the canal-system 

 of the Chalininai is, of course, of the highest importance, and 

 it is disappointing to find that the section of the paper 

 devoted to this subject is very brief. It will be best to give 

 the gist of the author's conclusions on this head in his own 

 words : — " Das Canalsystem der Chalineen ist sehr einfach. 

 * Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 5, vol. xviii. p. 331. 



