INTRODUCTION 



That portion of this memoir relating to the special collection 

 of the Bahama Expedition was nearly completed and the plates 

 were made more than ten years ago, but its publication was de- 

 layed for several reasons, but largely because of the desirability 

 of publishing, in advance of it, a much more extensive work, by 

 the wTiter, on the starfishes of the North Pacific coast of Amer- 

 ica (Harriman Series) then in type, and in which the classifica- 

 tion and many of the families and genera are revised. 



Unavoidable and unexpected delay of the larger work had like- 

 wise delayed this. In the meantime, owing to the lack of any 

 general work on the shallow water starfishes of the West Indies, 

 and to the very scattered and unsatisfactory condition of the 

 literature relating to them, it has been thought desirable to en- 

 large the report so as to include descriptions of all the families, 

 genera, and species known to occur in the West Indian fauna, in 

 waters less than 150 fathoms deep. 



The West Indian faunal region is here extended so as to in- 

 clude the entire region from northern Florida to Rio de Janeiro, 

 Brazil, and to include, also, the Bermudas and the whole of the 

 Gulf of Mexico. 



As compared with other tropical seas, the West Indian starfish 

 fauna is very poor in littoral and shallow water species. It is 

 rarely that more than twelve to fifteen species can be found by 

 careful shore and reef-collecting at any one place. 



Professor Clark (1898), after two seasons of shore and reef 

 collecting of the echinoderms at Jamaica, enumerated only four- 

 teen species of starfishes, although he visited both sides of the 

 island, as well as outlying reefs. The entire number of littoral 

 and very shallow water species probably does not exceed twenty 

 to twenty-two oyer large areas. 



This is not more than one-half or one-third the number to be 

 found in many other similar regions. 



