Mr Eobert Brown on Astropliyton ecutatum. 369 
lias well repaid me for any little hardships and dangers 
I may have undergone in gaining it ; and I take this op- 
portunity of thanking Captain George Deuchars of the s.s. 
Narwhal/' and his ofhcers, for the ready and intelligent 
assistance they tendered me whenever it lay in their power. 
The few observations which I have been enabled to make, I 
shall have the honour of laying before the Society at a future 
time. In the meantime I exhibit this specimen oi Astro- 
phyton scutatum, Link, Flem., et Forbes (Biit. FcJiin., p. 67), 
which I obtained, in September 1861, on the west side of 
Davis Strait, about a mile off Cape Kater, clinging to a 
whale line, from 150 to 200 fathoms — rocky and clayey 
bottom. It was laden with ova of a deep-red colour. I 
found nothing in its stomach but Diatomacese, and a spe- 
cimen of an Entomostracan, closely allied to, if not iden- 
tical with, Cetochilus arcticus of Baird, in the " Appendix to 
Sutherland's Voyage," vol. ii. p. cciii., the presence of which, 
however, may, with a specimen of a species of Yoldia em- 
braced in its arms, be only accidental. (It may be men- 
tioned as a curious fact, that this Cetochilus forms a great 
portion of the food of the " commercial" whale (Balcena 
mysticetus), a much disputed point, and of some of the 
minuter species of Acalephse.) 
Astropliyton scutatum has been occasionally got among 
the Northern Isles of Scotland (where it bears the rather 
classical name o^ Argus) and Norway.* 
It has been found, however, very rarely, and at distant 
periods, in the Arctic seas. Otlio Fabricius, in his remark- 
ably accurate Fauna Grcenlandica (Hafnise et Lipsise, 1780), 
speaks of it (p. 372) as follows : — " Asteria^s caput medusce. 
Hanc in museo plurimum reverendi Dn. Egede de colonia 
Jacobshavn (ni fallor) missam, vidi : unde conclude, in sinu 
Disco dari ; non autem vivam ipse offendi." 
Whether Fabricius refers here to Hans Egede, the pioneer 
missionary of Greenland (1721), or to his son, Paul Egede, 
also a missionary in Greenland, and both of whom published 
* The secretary of the Zoological Society lately exhibited a specimen at 
one of their meetings from the southern seas. (*' Habitat in omni oceano, 
imprimis Pelagico." — Linn. Syst., i. 663, Ed. 10.) 
