192 THE GENUS PEEIPATUS. 



To these observations I have now the following to add : 

 The colour, under the prolonged action of spirit, has become 

 lighter. The antennae, oral papillae, jaws and legs, resemble iu 

 all respects the same structures in the Caracas specimens. 

 The grooves on the legs were for the most part closed and 

 therefore slit-like. None of them possessed tubercles. 



Mr. Sclater has the following statement on the slits and 

 tubercles. " In my specimens and in that from Dominica, the 

 openings (i. e. the slits) are in many cases rounded, and some- 

 times have attached to them a bladder-shaped appendage." 

 I do not quite understand this passage, but if it means that 

 the slits are round openings and that there are tubercles in the 

 specimens he brought from Demerara, I cannot confirm his 

 statement. It is unfortunate that no males are to hand, as it 

 is important from a systematic point of view to know if they 

 have the tubercles such as are found in the Caracas species, 

 and if they difi'er from the females in the number of legs. The 

 length of a large specimen was 55 to 60 mm. 



Mr. Sclater states that all the specimens examined by him, 

 including those taken from the uterus, had thirty pairs of legs. 

 Mr. Sclater's observations must have been confined to a very 

 small number of his specimens. I examined fourteen adults : 

 of these seven had thirty pairs of ambulatory legs, six had 

 thirty-one, and one had twenty-seven. Out of thirteen 

 embryos examined seven have thirty pairs and six have 

 thirty-one. Unfortunately, I did not notice that the adults 

 varied in the number of their legs, until after the embryos had 

 been removed from all except the specimens with twenty-seven 

 pairs of legs ; so that it was not possible to determine, except- 

 ing in this case, whether the young resembled their parents in 

 this respect. Out of four embryos which had already developed 

 the full complement of legs and were removed from the speci- 

 men with twenty-seven pairs, three had twenty-seven and one 

 had twenty-eight pairs of ambulatory legs, so that it appears 

 that the number of legs varies in the species. 



The only other difi"erence between these specimens and those 

 from Caracas that I could detect, related to the primary 



