on REPORT—1899. 
Anophthalmus, eyeless genera of beetles. To the locality, or, rather, 
want of locality, which in these lists more immediately concerns ourselves, 
attention is directed only by a single name. As our inquiring eyes 
scrutinise the European assemblage, and take note of the famous caverns 
and countries through which this fauna‘is distributed, we find mention of. 
France and Germany, of Hungary and Spain, of Italy and Sicily, but 
never a word of England. Only a veiled allusion occurs in the entry, 
without specified locality, of the name Miphargus subterraneus (Leach). 
So far as Dr. Packard’s list is concerned, the explanation is simple, in that 
the species in question has not been recorded from any English cavern, 
though it belongs to the speleean fauna of the Continent. To puta better 
face upon the affair, it may be stated that the well fauna of England and 
Yreland includes four species of Amphipoda, though even this quartette 
was audaciously reduced to a single species by De Rougemont. From the 
deep recesses of a disused coal mine near Glasgow TZinea ustella was 
recorded by John Scott in 1850. A copepod has been described by Dr. 
G. 8. Brady from a Northumbrian coal mine. Whether coal mines any 
more than coal cellars can properly be included among caverns, we need 
not now pause to inquire. Unless the entomologists can come to the 
rescue with a goodly supply of cave-dwelling beetles and spring-tails, the 
subterranean fauna of Great Britain and Ireland will perhaps never prove 
to be rich in numbers. Still, when records are collected and investiga- 
tions extended, we may reasonably hope that the balance of over three 
hundred against us in the European catalogue will be seriously diminished. 
Since the scientific history of life below ground may be said to have begun 
in England, it should be our pride to take what share we can in the 
sequel. In the last fifty years, and more especially in the last twenty, a 
series of remarkable forms have been discovered in subterranean waters 
in various parts of the world. Even since Dr. Chilton’s paper appeared 
in 1894 many curious additions have been made to the well fauna 
of North America, such as the woodlouse, Haplophthalmus puteus, 
described by Mr. P. Hay, from an old well in Indiana, and the 
Spheroma thermophilum, described by Miss Harriet Richardson, from 
a warm spring in New Mexico, the one genus belonging to the Jand 
and the other to the sea, and neither of them having till recently been 
thought of in connection with fresh water, either hot or cold. In 
1896 ‘the United States Fish Commission completed an artesian 
well at San Marcos, Texas. The depth of the well is 188 feet. The flow 
of water obtained amounts to more than 1,000 gallons per minute. The 
water is pure and of excellent quality, and has a temperature of 73° 
Fahrenheit.’ To these interesting particulars Mr. James E. Benedict, of 
the U.S. National Museum, adds information which reminds one of the 
two girls in the fairy tale, with pearls and rubies falling from the lips of 
the one, and toads and lizards from the lips of the other, only that here 
the rewards are not distributed but combined. For not only is the water 
pure and excellent, but it delights the zoologist by sending up from the 
bowels of the earth isopods, amphipods, prawns, and salamanders. The 
species are all blind. The species are all new. The specimens are 
plentiful. The salamander has oddities of its own. The isopod has 
almost no excuse for not being marine. The prawn has eye-stalks, but 
they are totally devoid of ocular pigment. There is a theory that at-one 
time the globe was overspread with a blind fauna, the remnants of which 
have been preserved in deep waters and dark holes, whither creatures 
