BIGELOW: MEDUSAE AND SIPHONOPHORAE. 405 



Research collections from the Bay of Biscay (1911a). Most of the 

 Bache specimens are fragmentary, but their bells, though dissociated, 

 are sufficiently preserved for their characteristic outlines to identify 

 them at a glance. 



VoGTiA Kolliker, 1853. 



How many species are represented by the representatives of this 

 genus previously described, is still an open question. I formerly 

 recognized two only, V. pentacantha Kolliker and V. spinosa Keffer- 

 stein and Ehlers. But Moser (1913a, 1915a, 1915b) believes that the 

 specimens from Bering Sea described by me (1913) were in reality a 

 new species, which she has christened V. serrata. And she has not 

 only studied specimens of this form, from the collections of the Gauss 

 but compared them with V. pentacantha from the Mediterranean. 

 Unfortunately her preliminary papers give no description of her 

 specimens of V. serrata; nor does she state how she would distinguish 

 it from V. pentacantha. But from the fact that she refers my Bering 

 Sea (1913) series to it, I can only assume that she apphes this name to 

 Vogtias in which neither the facets nor the angles of old nectophores 

 are spinous. In V. spinosa both facets and angles bear prominent 

 tubercles or spines (Kefferstein and Ehlers, 1861, Haeckel, 1888b, 

 Bigelow, 1911b, p. 211, pi. 15, fig. 9, 10), whereas in the Mediterranean 

 V. pentacantha as described both by Kolliker (1853) and by Keffer- 

 stein and Ehlers (1861), and in the Biscayan specimen recorded by 

 me (1911a), the angles are spinous or tuberculate, the facets smooth. 

 As ]\Ioser (1913a) points cut, I', pentacantha is intermediate between 

 V. spinosa and F. serrata. And such extremes as V. spinosa, on the 

 one hand, and the smooth angled Bering Sea specimens (1913) on the 

 other, would undoubtedly represent two wholly distinct species, were 

 they discontinuous. But this is not the case, for not only is V. penta- 

 cantha intermediate between the two, with its young nectophores 

 almost exactly paralleling those of V. spinosa (p. 406), but the latter 

 is itself variable in the degree of spination of nectophores. So few 

 specimens of the V . pentacantha type have been examined critically 

 except by Moser, that final decision may well await the appearance of 

 her detailed account. In the meanwhile all three species may be 

 retained. 



All these Vogtias have angular nectophores. But the Bache 

 collection contains one specimen of a new species (p. 407), with the 

 Vogtia type of tentillum, but with rounded nectophores. 



