TO INDIAN CAECINOLOQY. 327 



at Madras, Ceylon, and the Nice-bars, and Prof. Camil Heller, in his Report on the 

 Crustacea of the Expedition, enumerates over one hundred species of Decapods and 

 Stomatopods taken in these localities. Recently the Crustacea collected by the brothers 

 Sarasin at Trincomali in Ceylon, and amounting to ninety-two species, have been re- 

 corded, and some new species described by Dr. E. Muller*. But the most valuable 

 contribution to the subject hitherto published is the Report by Dr. De Man, of Middel- 

 burg, on the Crustacea collected in the Mergui Archipelago by Dr. Anderson, late 

 Superintendent of the Indian Museum, Calcutta. This Report, which was published in 

 1887-88, and forms vol. xxii. of the Linnean Society's Journal in Zoology, is valuable, 

 not merely on account of its dealing with the first collection of any extent made 

 in the Bay of Bengal, one which naturally comprised a considerable proportion of new 

 species, but also on account of the careful manner in which the author has redescribed 

 a number of common species, which had been imperfectly characterized by their first 

 describers. 



All naturalists who have worked at this group have felt the impossibility, in many 

 cases, of determining the actual species which furnished the crude figures, or brief 

 diagnoses, by means of which most of the commoner and more widely distributed forms 

 have been handed down to us in the works of Herbst and Fabricius. Milne-Edwards 

 appears to have interpreted the species of last-century writers, without an actual exami- 

 nation of their types, and any errors he may have made in consequence have been followed 

 by most subsequent writers. It is therefore highly desirable, as De Man has suggested 

 and partly done, to re-examine the earlier types, which were described in a manner 

 that ampler material and increased knowledge have shown to be quite inadequate. In 

 most cases where the original specimens are sufficiently well preserved to render their 

 identity certain, and whei'e there can be no doubt as to correctness of labelling, it is 

 probably advisable to adopt the original designation, though whether a long-established 

 and universally-adopted name should be displaced by the discovery of some forgotten 

 specimen seems to me very questionable. 



The greater part of my own collecting has been done at three differently-situated 

 localities, some account of which, along with the chief features in their Crustacean 

 fauna, I have ventured to draw up, such information being usually scanty in systematic 

 works, where very often the writer has not been at the same time the collector of the 

 specimens on which he reports. 



The harbour of Madras, which may be taken as typical of the entire Coromandel 

 coast, does not at first sight appear to offer much promise to the carcinologist, but 

 more extended observation will show that it is far richer in species than could have 

 been expected from the nature of the locality. On this coast the sea breaks at some 

 distance from the shore in an almost constant surf, and the waves finally roll in on a 

 low sandy beach, where the average range of the tide is not more than two or three- 

 feet. On the sandy shore species of Ocypoda (O. pJatytards, O. macrocera) are met 

 with, running about towards the water's edge in countless numbers, chiefly in the 



* "Zur Cnistaceenfauua von Trincomnli," Verhandl. d. naturf. Gesellseh. Basel. Theil viii. 1887. 



48* 



