173 





KEVISION of the GENEBIC NOMENCLATUEE 



and CLASSIFICATION in Bowerbank's 



"BEITISH SPONGIADjE." 



By E. Hanitsch, Ph.D., 



DEMONSTRATOR OF ZOOLOGY IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL. 



[Read 11th May, 1894.] 



No Spongologist is likely to expect an apology for the 

 present paper. Whilst the faithfulness of the illustrations 

 and the correctness — in general — of the descriptive part 

 in Bowerbank's "British Spongiadee " is such that this 

 Monograph will remain indispensable to students for time 

 to come, yet his generic nomenclature and classification 

 are incomprehensible and have never been accepted. 

 "What Bowerbank understood by a genus will remain a 

 mystery. One out of numerous instances is sufficient : 

 his genus Hymeniacidon has had to be broken up into no 

 less than fifteen different genera, including amongst them 

 the following : Halichondria, Esperella, Clathria, Suber- 

 ites, Dercitus and perhaps even Halisarca. 



Therefore I have made an attempt in this paper to 

 assign all species described in Bowerbank's Monograph 

 to their proper genera, as the latter are accepted at present, 

 thus continuing and supplementing what Oscar Schmidt 

 (15, p. 76) began in 1870. Whilst thus I shall be respon- 

 sible for the correctness of the generic names, I do not 

 wish to be equally so for the specific names. Many of 

 Bowerbank's species will, in time to come, be found 

 synonymous with others described by himself or by other 

 authors. This, I think, applies chiefly to the still numer- 

 ous species of Halichondria, Beniera and Hymeniacidon, 



