No. 391.] REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 617 
mention is made of one other species which they doubtfully identify 
with P. sieboldi Horst, the first Perichazta species described from 
Japan, and one well known in European museums. Of over two 
hundred specimens belonging to this species, all without exception 
differed from the descriptions of P. sieboldi by European writers in 
one important character, vzz., the position of the spermathecz. Since 
many of their specimens were collected from the same region from 
which the European specimens were known, or supposed to have 
been collected, it seems to be the inference of the authors that their 
species is identical with P, sieboldi, and that the European writers 
erred in their description of that species. Unfortunately their own 
description is so extremely meager that it is of little use to any one 
else who might attempt to determine the relations of their species to 
others already described. 
Horst,! who first described Z. sieboldi, has reéxamined the type of 
that species and confirmed the correctness of the earlier descriptions, 
and concludes that the two species are not identical. 
The genus Perichzta already includes a hundred or more species, 
and the need is great for more detailed descriptions than those which 
our authors have seen fit to give us. 
Horst calls attention to the peculiar fact that of the nine species 
of Perichzeta previously described from Japan, none have come under 
the observation of Goto and Hatai. 
In a third paper? is described a species living in the gutters and 
ditches of Tokyo, and belonging to the family Tubificida. These 
worms seemed to the author to be more nearly allied to Vermiculus 
pilosus, described from the southern coasts of England by Goodrich 
in 1892, than to any other form, and so are included in the same 
genus under the name V. /émosus. 
The description is reasonably complete and includes eight pages 
of text, accompanied by five diagrammatic figures. 
Among the more noticeable peculiarities of the new species are the 
short, nearly straight sperm ducts which open into a common ventral 
spermiducal chamber on the eleventh somite, and the unpaired open- 
ing of the spermathece on the ventral side of somite X, both of 
which characters it has in common with the other member of the 
genus. Some peculiarities in which it differs from V. pilosus are the 
1 BE On Pericheta sieboldi, Notes from the Leyden Museum, vol. xx, 
Pp- Sg 
2 Hatai, ei On Vermiculus limosus,a New Species of Aquatic Oligochzta, 
Annotationes Zoöl. Japonenses, vol. ii, Pt. iv, pp. 103-111. 
