No. 497] NOTES AND LITERATURE 



353 



ing for it clearly shows that the familiar name Penfacrinus 

 miilleri, which has been used for a well-known West Indian cri- 

 noid for over half a century must give way to the combination 

 Isocrinus parrm (Guerin), the specific component of which ante- 

 dates miilleri by over twenty years. 



Although the genus Antedon of previous writers had already 

 yielded him nineteen new genera, Mr. Clark's indefatigable la- 

 bors convinced him that the residue left therein (some 36 species) 

 was not a homogeneous or natural group. In his "New Genera 

 of Unstalked Crinoids," 9 he has analyzed it and resolved it into 

 thirteen elements, three of which are monotypic and three con- 

 tain only two species each. Although he names his new genera 

 with his customary skill and euphony, and gives the genotype 

 and other species of each, he does not tell us what is left for 

 Antedon s. str., and if we attempt to figure it out for ourselves, 

 we reach the remarkable conclusion that Antedon as noAv limited 

 contains minus 7 species ! For, in October Mr. Clark said that 

 Antedon (in the restricted sense in which he then used the name) 

 contained 36 species. Since October he has described two addi- 

 tional species, which would give him 38 species for the new 

 genera described in April. But these 12 new genera contain a 

 total of 45 species, and therefore Antedon s. str. must now have 

 — 7 species! Whether this discrepancy is due to the shifting 

 of the limits of some of his earlier genera, or to species of other 

 writers which he had previously overlooked, or to nomina mida 

 introduced in the paper under discussion, we shall leave to Mr. 

 Clark to explain at some future time.— Besides his new genera 

 of Antedonidas, Mr. Clark splits Eudiocrinus into two genera 

 which he considers fundamentally distinct, and he then proposes 

 no less than eight families of comatulids, with 39 genera. As he 

 gives no definitions, or even a key, to these families, we can not 

 express an opinion as to their validity. We can only wonder if 

 Mr. Clark's enthusiasm is not leading him to magnify relatively 

 unimportant details into significant morphological differences, 

 and blinding him to the fundamental similarities of structure 

 which the Antedonidrr show. 



The ten papers here reviewed are sufficient to convince any one 

 that their writer is a worker of extraordinary industry and en- 

 thusiasm. More than this, however, they give promise that Mr. 

 Clark is to become a worthy successor to Carpenter as an au- 

 thority on recent crinoids. Situated where the great collections 



Troc. Biol Soc. Wash., 21, pp. 125-136. 



