1908,] ON A RARE OLIGOCH^XE WORM IN ENGLAND. 365 



2. A Note on the Occm-rence of a Species o£ Phreatothrix 

 (Vejdovsky) in England, and on some Points in its 

 Structure. By Frank E. Beddard, M.A., F.R.S., 

 F.Z.S., Korresp. Mitgl. d. K. Bohm. Ges. Wiss., &c. 



[Received April 28, 1908.] 

 (Text-figures 76 & 77.) 



A few days since Dr. Harmer, F.R.S., was sn good as to 

 forward to me a number of worms which had been sent to the 

 Cambridge Museum for identification under the following 

 circumstances : — A gentleman resident near Cambridge has boi-ed 

 a well upon his property, and in the water drawn from this well 

 appeared considerable numbers of an Oligochtete which proves to 

 belong to the genus described some thirty years since by Prof. 

 Vejdovsky, O.M.Z.S.*, from examples supplied to him from a 

 well in Prague. So far as I am aware, that memoir is the only 

 one of recent date which contains any infoi'mation upon this 

 worm, which appears, however, to have been originally described 

 about one hundred years earlier from the same city. It is clearly 

 therefore a genus which is limited to underground waters ; and 

 I am not aware of any other record of its occurrence save those 

 referred to, and that to be communicated in the present report 

 to the Zoological Society of London. 



I am therefore able to record the presence of this interesting 

 Lumbriculid in this country for the first time. 



The account given of it by Yejdovsky f seems to me, after 

 having carefully examined a number of examples of the living 

 worm, to have included all the chief points in its structure. 

 There remain some minutiae in which I differ from Yejdovsky or 

 supplement him. The difierences are, I am inclined to think 

 due to a difference between the species. 



In his account of the species given in his great work upon 

 the Oligochfeta J, Vejdovsky figures the minute tactile processes 

 which stand stifily out from the prostomium. I find that these 

 processes are not limited to the prostomium — though doubtless 

 more numerous there than elsewhere, — but occur also even on the 

 seta-bearing segments for some distance back. As I shall brino- 

 forward in the sequel some reasons for regarding this species as 

 being hitherto undescribed, this point may be possibly urged as 

 among those which prove this view. 



The setce do not appear in their general arrangement or form 

 to difier from those of Phreatothrix pragensis. But in one of the 

 examples which I studied (text-fig. 76) I found a persistence of setfe 

 on the first segment, which is at least extremely unusual among the 



* Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. Bd. xxvii. p. 543 (1876), with preliminary notes in earlier 

 papers quoted by him. 



f Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. Bd. xxvii. p. o48. 



I"Syst. u. Morph. d. Oligochaeten, Frag, 1884, p. 54. 



