of the Fishery Board for Scotland. 70 
and lateral. The posterior suckers, which are small and of an oval form, 
are each armed with four hooks, and each sucker appears to be divided into 
two nearly equal parts. The suckers seem to be supported on minute 
prominences and crowded together along the edge of the expanded 
membranous border which terminates the posterior end of the body. 
The number of suckers on the specimen represented by the drawing (fig. 6) 
is fifty-two. According to van Beneden, the suckers are mobile and can 
turn towards or away from each other, and that also by contraction to 
appear sometimes to be fewer in number and sometimes more numerous. 
Along the middle of the body and at the posterior extremity the colour 
is yellowish-white, while along each side is a dusky-coloured border. 
The length of the specimen figured is about 10 mm., but others reach only 
to 8 or 9 mm., or are even smaller. 
Habitat.— Parasitic on the gills of the sea pike or Gar-fish, Ramphistoma 
belones, Linn. (Belones vulgaris, Cuv.); captured in the North Sea about the 
end of April and beginning of May, 1910; apparently not very rare. 
Genus Amphiptyches, Grube and Wagener (1852). 
Amphiptyches urna, Grube and Wagener. Pl. VIII. 
1852. Amphiptyches urna, G. and W., Miiller’s Archiv (1852). 
Pi, xiv. 
Several examples, which include some apparently adult as well as others 
scarcely mature, were obtained in the intestine of specimens of Chimera 
monstrosa sent to the Laboratory at the Bay of Nigg from the Aberdeen 
Fish Market in January, 1910. The fish, it is understood, were captured in 
the North Sea. 
Amphiptyches differs remarkably in its general appearance from the 
Entozoa usually met with in the intestines of marine fishes, while on the 
other hand it, has a strong superficial resemblance to certain species of 
the Nudibranch mollusca. There also appears to have been at first some 
doubt as to the relationship between these parasites and the fish in which 
they were observed, 
The parasite was described by Grube and Wagener in 1852 in Miiller’s 
Archiv, under the name of Amphiptiches urna. The specimens, along with 
the shells of Mactra—a Lamellibranch shellfish—were found in the intestine 
ot Chimera monstrosa captured in the Mediterranean. 
Diesing, in his Revision der Helminthen, 1858, ascribes this organism to 
his genus G'yrocotyle, and records it under the name of Gyrocotyle 
amphiptyches, Gr. aud W. 
In 1859 Dr. Paul Gervais and P.-J. van Beneden, in their work ‘“ Zoologie 
médicale,” vol. ii., p. 193, after referring, under the sub-order Polycotylares 
Blainv., to various genera of the Tristomidae, proceed to remark that the 
g. Amphiptyches found by. Grube and Wagener in the intestinal canal of 
Chimera appeared to be a parasite of that mollusc, and that its position in 
the fish was that of an erratic—a parasite that had lost its way by being 
accidentally swallowed by the Chimera.* 
In a further note, however, on these parasites published in his work on 
“Les Poissons des Cotes de Belgique” in 1870, Professor P.-J. van Beneden 
remarks that, having studied this singular worm only from specimens pre- 
served in liquer obligingly communicated to him by G. Wagener, he had 
some doubt about them being internal parasites of fishes, and adds that, 
having since procured an adult Chimera captured on the coast of Norway, 
* Le G. Amphiptyches, trouvé par Grube et G. Wagener dans le canal intestinal de 
al Chimére avec des coquilles de Mactre, pourrait bien étre un parasite de ce dernier 
Mollusque, se trouvant a l’état erratique dans le poisson qui l’a fourni. Il n’y a en 
effet aucun autre ver polycotylaire vivant dans le tube digestif. 
