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Show 182 MISS A. CRANE ON A BRACHIOPOD [^Pr> ^, desire, were presented to the nation) were removed to the Geological Department of the Natural History Branch of the British Museum at South Kensington, where lie wished them to be deposited, Mr. Brazier's series was found apart from the recent specimens with the fossil collection. Each species had been placed in a separate box with a number inside, and this number was found to correspond with Mr. Brazier's list, which Dr. Davidson bad copied into his letter-book with his remarks appended. The executor instructed me temporarily to retain the series for examination. One very interesting new species of the remarkable genus Atretia was discovered. This Dr. Davidson had named after his friend and correspondent Mr. John Brazier, of Sydney, who has dredged so extensively in Australian waters. The name Atretia brazieri was attached in Dr. Davidson's handwriting. The specimens are so excellent that there can be no possibility of generic error on my part, and I have therefore thought it m y duty to publish a short description of Atretia brazieri, Dav., n. sp. MS., to secure priority for his last species, which should be figured in Part II. of the Davidson Monograph of Recent Brachiopoda which I am now engaged in editing for tbe Transactions of the Linnean Society. Atretia, as its name implies, is an imperforate genus. It mav be as well briefly to recapitulate the history of the type species, first published by Dr. Gwyn Jeffreys under the name Cryptopora gnomon in ' Nature"' for Dec. 1869. In the 'Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist.' 1876, Jeffreys gave the earliest description of the species, substituting the generic name Atretia for Cryptopora ; Dr. Davidson gave the first figures in his Supplement to the " Recent and Tertiary British Brachiopoda" (Pal. Soc. 1874), and again illustrated the species in one of the two plates he contributed to Dr. Jeffreys's paper on " The Mol-lusca (Brachiopoda) of the 'Lightning' and 'Porcupine" Expeditions," published in the Proc. Zool. Soc, April 1878. Atretia gnomon was dredged off the west coast of Ireland in from 1380-1443 fms. ; during the 'Valorous' expedition, 1100-1750 fms., in Davis Straits. It was found by Dr. Friele (during the Norwegian Arctic expedition) about 30 miles W . of Tromso, in 650 fms., "on the slope of the banks cold area." It was dredged off Marocco and the Canaries at depths of 50-65 fms., by the ' Talisman ' and French expeditions. In all more than fifty examples of the European representative of this well-marked Rhynchonelloid have been obtained by Jeffreys, Friele, and the Marquis de Folin. M . Eugene Deslongchamps, in his ' Etudes Critiques sur des Brachiopodes nouveaux ou peu connus,' p. 2 42 (Caen, 1884), expresses an opinion that Atretia gnomon, Jeffr., is probably only a very young stage of R.psittacea, Chemn. But the recent discovery by Mr. Biazier of eleven good specimens of the genus Atretia in the Southern Pacific Ocean, off the coast of N e w South Wales, tends to invalidate that assumption, the only Rhynchonellce in tbe Australian and Novo-Zelandian region being the deeply ribbed or furrowed Rh. nigricans and its variety, H. pyxidata, Boog-Watson. To these well-characterized forms Atretia brazieri, smooth, flat |