REPOKT ON THE STOMATOPODA. 
3 
While I have been able to show, from the study of the Challenger specimens, that 
many of Claus’s conclusions are incorrect, and that he referred some of the most familiar 
larval types to the wrong adult genera, I feel that I could not have accomplished this 
alone, and that, while my results are in many cases directly opposite to his conclu- 
sions, my ability to reach and to prove them is due, in a very great degree, to the study 
of his memoir. The labour of tracing the history of the larvse has been so simplified 
through the accurate illustrations and ample and minute descriptions which he has 
furnished, that the investigator who follows him in this field has much of the difficulty 
removed, and, while I feel that I leave the subject in a much more satisfactory condition 
than that in which I found it, I also feel that I could not have made the same progress 
wdthout the aid of his memoir. 
The beautiful transparent, glass-like pelagic larvse of the Stomatopoda are familiar 
to all naturalists who have had an opportunity to study pelagic life, and none of the 
animals which are captured at the surface in the tow-net exceed them in interest to the 
student, or in beauty and grace. Their perfect transparency, which allows the whole of 
their complicated structure to be studied in the living animal, their great size and 
rapacity, the graceful beauty of their constant and rapid movements, and the pro- 
fundity of the morphological problems which they present for solution, cannot fail to 
fascinate the naturalist. Unfortunately they are as difficult to study as they are 
beautiful and interesting, and, notwithstanding their great abundance and variety, only 
two or three of them have been traced to their adult form. 
Unlike most Malacostraca, the Stomatopods, instead of carrying their developing eggs 
about with them, deposit them in their deep and inaccessible burrows under the water, 
where they are aerated by the currents of water produced by the abdominal feet of the 
parent, which are so shaped as to form valves or paddles which exactly conform to the 
outline of the cylindrical hole. The eggs quickly perish when deprived of this constant 
current, and as it is very difficult to procure them at all, I know of no young Stomatopod 
which has been reared from an egg outside the burrow or in an aquarium. The older 
larvse are hardy, and they thrive in small aquaria and moult into the adult form, but 
they are seldom found near the shore, and microscopic research is so difficult in mid ocean 
that almost nothing has been accomplished in this way. The younger larvse are common 
near the shore, but they seldom pass through a moult in confinement, and the only way 
to trace the life-history of the Stomatopoda is therefore by the comparison of the series 
of larvse which are collected in the ocean, and this is attended with peculiar difficulties, 
for the number of larval forms which have been described is much greater than the 
number of adults which are known, and many of them unquestionably belong to unknown 
species, and possibly to unknown genera. 
The growth of the larvse is very slow, and the larval life long, and as they are as 
independent and as much exposed to changes in their environment, and to the struggle 
