﻿President's Address. 



43 



up the study of the group, and already it has been the 

 subject of several important papers by him.^ As a result 

 of the examination of material collected by me in this 

 district during the last two years, he has published two 

 papers in the Annals of Scottish Natural History ^ on " The 

 Tardigrada of the Forth Valley." The number of species 

 there recorded is 16, three of them — Biphascon scotimm, 

 D. hullatum, and D. oculatum — being named and described 

 as new to science. Two other forms, possibly also new, are 

 described, but not named. Since these papers were written 

 Mr Murray has detected another species, Macrohiotus papil- 

 lifer, Mur., in moss I brought from the top of Ben Ledi 

 on 4th September 1906, so that we now know of 17 named 

 forms, regarded as specifically distinct, from the area.^ 



It is quite impossible to say what number of Water-bears 

 may be expected to occur in "Forth," so many unknown 

 quantities having to be reckoned with, but, according to 

 our present knowledge, 25 to 30 does not seem an extravagant 

 estimate. Mr Murray tells me his list for Scotland, as 

 a whole, now amounts to about 40 species. 



PYCNOaONIDA. 



This small, but none the less remarkable class of marine 

 Arthropods, frequently called " Sea-spiders," — a vernacular 

 name which Mr Stubbing suggests might with advantage 

 be replaced by " Sea-spindles " * — has never been properly 

 worked in Forth waters. In 1842 Harry Goodsir described 

 inter alia three from the Firth of Forth, namely, Pallene 



^ "The Tardigrada of the Scottish Lochs," 1905, and other papers in 

 Tram. Roy. Soc. Edin., etc. 



2 1905, pp. 160-164; and 190-6, pp. 214-217. In the Zoologist for 1907, 

 p. 3, Murray describes Macrohiotus dispar, n.sp., previously recorded from 

 ponds near Edinburgh as M. macronyx, Doy. Another locality, from which 

 I obtained it in Aug-ust 1906, is Camilla Loch, Fife. 



^ In his latest paper on Scottish Tardigrada {Trans. R. S. E., xlv. , p. 663, 

 1907), Murray describes another new species, Macr. pullari, from the Forth 

 area, etc. Perhaps it is the form he referred to M. ornatus, Eicht., in his 

 Forth list. 



^ "The No-bodies— a sea-faring family," is the title of a series of instructive 

 chapters on the Pycnogonida by the Rev. T. R. R. Stebbing, in Knowledge 

 for 1902 and 1903. 



