488 ME. p. F. CARPENTER OK KEW 



nent that I visited in the summer cf 1880, 1 found great numbers 

 of undescribed Comatulas from very various localities. Some few 

 of these I have w^orked out already *, while others are described 

 in the following pages ; and I hope in course of time to be able to 

 take advantage of the courteous offers that have been made to 

 me, and describe those that are as yet unnamed. They are very 

 numerous, however; and when my descriptions of the hundred 

 odd ' Challenger ' species shall have been published, there will yet 

 remain some fifty more, from the dredgings of the U.S. Coast 

 Survey, to be worked out. Even after making allowance for the 

 immense amount of local variation which occurs in the group, I 

 should estimate it to contain at least four hundred species. Only 

 thirty of these were described by Mliller ; and since his time less 

 than twenty had been described by other naturalists up to the 

 time when I began to work at the group, rather more than six 

 years ago. Roughly speaking therefore, and apart from the 

 ' Challenger ' and ' Blake ' collections, there remain some two 

 hundred species yet to be described ; so that a very long time 

 must necessarily elapse before it is possible to make out a check- 

 list of the Comatulce like the admirable one of the Ophiurids 

 which Mr. Lyman has published. 



I have often wondered why the family has been so entirely 

 neglected since the time of Miiller ; but the result is very advan- 

 tageous to present workers in one point, viz., the very small 

 amount of literature that has to be consulted. On the other 

 hand, it is no easy task to draw up a satisfactory scheme of classi- 

 fication for four hundred species, more than nineteen-twentieths 

 of which belong to but two genera. Only three species of Fro- 

 machocrinus are known, and three of Atelecrinus. These last, 

 together with the four species of the genus Eudiocrinus, are de- 

 scribed in the following pages. 



I. On the Species or Atelecrinus and Eudiocrinus t. 



G-enus Atelecrinus, P. H. Carpenter, 1881|. 



Centrodorsal acorn- shaped, and bearing five vertical double rows of 



cirrus-sockets, those of each row alternating with one another and with 



the sockets of adjoining rows. They have horseshoe-shaped rims, the 



* " The CoviatuIcB of the Leyden Museum," Notes from the Leyden Museum, 

 vol. iii. pp. 173-217. 



t Published by permission of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and 

 of Carlile P. Patterson, Superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey. 



\ Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool. vol. ix. no. 4, p. 16. 



