The Life-history of an Acarus, &c. By A. B. Michael. 381 



which was absent from Haller's species, and most of the other 

 generic characters. The species also possesses some features not 

 characteristic of the genus, because they are not found in all species, 

 but which, as far as I know, have not hitherto been observed in 

 any other genus. Therefore, although Haller was right in making 

 a new genus for his Bermacarus sciurinus at the time when he 

 did so, yet he might possibly desire to reconsider the question now 

 that intermediate species have been found, and I think it safer, at 

 present, to place the new species in the genus Glyciphagus, but I 

 have given Bermacarus in a bracket as a note of the close 

 connection. 



With regard to the specific name, I should have wished to 

 retain Kramer's name, but it is obviously impossible to retain his 

 generic name, and as the description attached to his specific name 

 is based entirely on the Hyjoopus, which is totally difierent from 

 every other stage, I fear it would be unwise and misleading to 

 retain it; moreover, I have not ever found the adult form or 

 ordinary nymph or larva upon the mole. I wish still somehow to 

 retain in the name of the species something to connect it with 

 Dr. Kramer, as that excellent acarologist was the first to draw 

 attention to any stage of the creature ; therefore, although I do 

 not ordinarily think it desirable to call species after men, I propose 

 to call this " Cranieri." 



With regard to the more interesting features of the creature 

 itself, irrespective of its life-history, probably the most striking 

 is the armature, or ornamentation, whichever it may be, of the first 

 two pairs of legs of the male, and this is, as far as I know, quite 

 without parallel in the Acarina, except that a development of the 

 same class, but far less in degree, exists in one other species of 

 Glyciphagus, viz. G. ornatus, a species discovered and described 

 by Kramer in 1881,* in which the tibial joints of the first and 

 second legs of the male bear at the distal edge of their under sides 

 an appendage which Kramer describes as a comb-shaped hair, of 

 which the stem is feathered along the median line, like the other 

 hairs of the creature, but on each side stand out a close single row 

 of flat spikes, exactly like the teeth of a comb ; there are five to 

 six of these teeth on each side of the hair on the first leg, and ten 

 to eleven on each side of that on the second leg. 



In the present species (male only) the first two pairs of legs 

 are remarkably strong, thick, and curved ; the tarsus is con- 

 siderably and gradually diminished in thickness from the proximal 

 toward the distal end, but the actual distal end is suddenly 

 thickened to form a recurved hook in the median line on the under 

 side. Along the median line of this joint, both above and below, 



* "Uebcr Milben," Zeitsch. f. d. Gesammt. Naturw,, liv. (1881). 



