1522 
KOTES OK AUSTRALIA K EAETH’WOnMS. 
Some fifty species of Australian earthworms are now known, 
but it is very probable that three or four times this number wfill 
not entirely exhaust this section of the fauna. 
Professor Baldwin Sp>encer’s admirable and superbly illustrated 
monograph* dealing with the anatomy of Megascolides austraRs, 
McCoy, the Giant Earthworm of Gippsland, is a contribution 
most welcome to the student of earthworms. In it Prof. Spencer 
points out that my name Xotoscolex must give way to Megascolides, 
McCoy. Nevertheless, as the characters of Megascolides as summed 
up by Professor McCoy himself weref: — “I am constrained to 
use a special generic title Alegascolides for the present form, and 
make it the type of a distinct genus, which only differs as far as 
I know from Lumbricus in its great size, very much more 
numerous rings, and the clitellae formed of three separate short 
bands, not going round the body, but being confined to the ventral 
side,” an opinion which, so far as I know, Prof. McCoy never 
subsequently modified — it is obvious that under the circxunstances 
I was quite justified in proposing the genus Xotoacolex, and in 
supposing the large Gippsland worms which I examined to be 
different from Megascolid^s australis. 
Professor Spencer’s interesting discovery of two separate pairs 
of vasa deferentia, and of a posterior series of large specialised 
nephridia will, when other species have l>een as minutely examined, 
it may be hoped, lead up to characters of diagnostic importance ; 
e.gr., characters, other than those of the clitellum, which will 
satisfactorily sejjarate forms like Megascolides {^Xotoscolex) and 
Cryptodrilm are still desiderata. Nevertheless, as the Tasmanian 
^legascolides has a pair of nephridia in each segment, with a pair 
of couspicuous nephridiopores, while in M. Illaicarrce n.sp., there 
are, as far as I can discover, only single pairs of testes, ciliated 
rosettes and vesicular (and presumably a single pair of vasa, for 
they are not visible in ordinary dissection), it yet remains to be 
* Trans. Boy. Soc. of Victoria, Tol. I., pt. i., ISSS ; Abstract in Trans, 
and Proc. Roy. Soc. of Viet., XXIV., Pt. ii., p. 164. 
tProdomus of the Zoology of Victoria, 1S7S, Decade I., p. 23. 
