CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES. Sl 
its assistance one may suffer the fate of the husbandman who, in a drought, 
incautiously prayed to Jupiter for rain, without specifying the quantity 
required, and presently had to swim for his life from his flooded farm. 
There isthe same chance of a surplus, of having, so to speak, rather too 
much of a good thing, were we to take into our survey all those marine 
species which on the shore or in the sea hide under stones or bury them- 
selves in sand and ooze—sea-anemones and sand-eels, annelids and amphi- 
pods, sea-urchins and starfishes, cockles and razor-shells, friends and foes, 
the blind and the seeing, the brilliant and the dull, the agile and the slow— 
a list that might be extended into details of inexhaustible interest, but 
interminable length. 
From these fields of research, so well known and so bewilderingly wide, 
I turn to one which is by comparison exceedingly small and obscure, to 
one which has certainly not been overworked or exhausted in this country 
to one, moreover, in which the organisation of afliliated societies might 
easily render essential service. The animals which are born and bred and 
pass their lives in wells and caverns may be regarded as the true under- 
ground fauna. Though in wells they may have no ground actually overhead, 
still they live far below the surface, and, whether in well or cave, they are 
the permanent occupants, distinct from thosecreatures which scuttle in and 
out, and do most of their fighting, feeding, and foregathering in the external 
world. 
The first undoubted mention of an underground crustacean seems to be 
that of an amphipod found in London, and named by Dr. Leach of the 
British Museum in 1813, nor in earlier times do any important researches 
appear to have been made as to the subterranean fauna of any part of the 
globe. But, whatever the novelty and narrowness of the subject may be, 
there are now scores of valuable treatises upon it, in a variety of European 
languages, Polish and others. In the long list of authors one may note 
in passing the names of Fries and Gustav Joseph, Wrzednigowski and 
Vejdovski and Moniez, leaving the majority to be discovered in two admir- 
able works, of which the English student will be well advised to make 
himself master. One of these is ‘The Cave Fauna of North America,’ by 
Dr. Alpheus Spring Packard, published in the ‘Memoirs of the National 
Academy of Sciences,’ vol. iv., Washington, 1888. The other is ‘The 
Subterranean Crustacea of New Zealand,’ by Dr. Charles Chilton, pub- 
lished in the ‘Transactions of the Linnean Society of London for 1894.’ 
Packard enumerates 308 European cave animals and 102 American. 
This total of 410 includes a few Protozoa, a sponge, two hydras, a few 
worms, one mollusc, several Crustacea and myriapods, numerous arachnids, 
and a host of Coleoptera, the other insects being chiefly Thysanura. The 
vertebrates are limited to four American fishes and one European 
batrachian, the celebrated Protews anguineus. In the specific names of 
these animals there are, as might be expected, abundant references to 
their peculiar choice of residence, as in the designations cavaticus, cavicola, 
cavicolens, cavernarum, speluncarum, and, with more particularity, 
wyandottensis, nickajackensis, mammothia, not to speak of the blood- 
curdling stygius, orcinus, and infernalis. To the colouring, or, rather, 
want of colouring in many of them, the epithets albus, pallidus, niveus, 
pellucidus, bear their testimony. To the feature, or, rather, want of feature, 
which in cave animals has attracted more attention than anything else, 
notice is called in several of the generic as well as the specific names, as in 
T'yphlichthys and Amblyopsis, the blind fishes, in Adelovs, Aphenops, and 
