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Show 18 MR. E. J. MIERS ON CRUSTACEA FROM [J1 3. On a Collection of Crustacea made by Capt. H. C. St. John, E.N., in the Corean and Japanese Seas. By E D W A RD J. MIERS, F.L.S., F.Z.S.-Part I. Podophthalmia. With an Appendix by Capt. H. C. ST. JOHN. [Received November 23, 1878.] (Plates I.-III.) The collections of Crustacea made by Capt, H. C. St. John while engaged in surveying the Japanese coasts between the years 1870 and 1877 have been presented by Dr. J. Gwyn Jeffreys, F.R.S., to the Trustees of the British Museum, and are of so much interest, both from the geographical distribution of the species and on account of the many novelties collected, that I have thought it desirable to bring an account of them before the Society. The specimens were nearly all obtained by dredging ; and Capt. St. John has furnished an interesting account of the mode adopted by him in collecting and separating the specimens, which is printed below as an Appendix. But few of the larger and well-known littoral species, which are so well described and figured by De Haan in his standard work upon the Crustacea of Japan (in Siebold, 'Fauna Japonica,' 1833-50), are represented in the collection. Comparatively little was known of the Crustacean fauna of the deeper waters of this region until the publication, in 1857-60, of a series of papers by the late Dr. W . Stimpson, the eminent American carcinologist, on the Decapoda collected by the U.S. Expedition to the North Pacific under Commanders C. Ringgold and J. Rodgers, in the ' Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences,' which contain short Latin diagnoses of a large number of new species (many of them obtained at considerable depths), and in which also a considerable number of species previously described by Milne- Edwards, Dana, Adams and White, and others are added to the Japanese fauna. It is much to be regretted that no fuller account of these collections should ever have appeared, and that Stimpson's preliminary report did not extend beyond the Decapoda. As Capt. St. John's collections were made in the same region, many of Stimpson's species occur in them ; and in their determination I have been greatly aided by comparing them with a series of specimens from the Japanese Seas, named by Dr. Stimpson himself, and presented some years ago by the Smithsonian Institution to the British Museum. It is remarkable, under the circumstances, that the present collection should contain so many forms which are new to science, while so many of Stimpson's species still remain desiderata to the national collection; and this goes far to prove that a rich harvest will yet reward the collector of marine Invertebrata in the JaDanese region and that even more interesting results may be expected in many regions where no dredging-operations have yet been attempted. The |