JAPANESE NUDIBRANCHS. 23 



ho accidently mixed up the notes which he had made on two 

 different animals. (2) There is some uncertainly as to the speci- 

 fic name of the type specimen and its specific characters cannot 

 be formulated. I therefore think that it is better to neglect 

 entirely Ehrenberg's genus Actinocyclus and his species ocellatus 

 or verrucosus and to treat the genus as Sphaerodoris Bergh 1817. 

 There are two certain species Sph. punctata and Sph. laevis, both 

 created by Bergh. As he himself observed, his Sph. papiliata 

 may be merely a variety of Sph. punctata. The type specimen 

 which is preserved in the Copenhagen Museum is a remarkable 

 looking animal with the dorsal ridges and tubercles highly 

 developed but the differences from Sph. punctata seem to be of 

 degree rather than kind. 



Sphaerodoris japonica sp. nov. 



(Cf. for Sph. punctata and Sph. papiliata Bergh, Mal. Unters. Heft xiii, 1878, p. 587 ff. For 

 Sph. laevis Bergh, Mal. Unters. Heft xvii, 1890, p. 924, and Eliot in Proc. Zool. Soc. 

 1904, p. 403.) 



One specimen labelled Ago Bay, Shima. It is 61 mm. long, 

 32 broad and 14 high. The foot, which has expanded margins, 

 is almost exactly as wide as the back. The colour is yellowish 

 brown, spinkled here and there (especially on the tips of the 

 tubercles) with black or bluish spots. The smaller tubercles bear 

 a single bluish spot on the tip but the larger ones bear many 

 snch spots united into dark blotches. 



The dorsal surface is hard and leathery. It bears about 30 

 tubercles arranged in four fairly regular rows, with a smaller ones 

 placed round the mantle margin, and also here and there among 

 the large ones. They vary from 1 .5 mm. to 7 mm. in breadth and 

 from 1.5 mm. to 2 mm. in height as preserved but were perhaps 

 more prominent in life. The mantle edge is not very wide and is 

 smooth beneath. No oral tentacles of any kind are visible. The 

 mouth is a round opening immediately above the anterior margin 

 of the foot which is deflected downwards in the middle so as to 

 form a semicircular groove round the lower half of the mouth. 

 The area round the branchial pocket is smoother than the rest 



