Notes from the Leyden Museum

Abstract

IT was a very happy thought of the late Prof. Schlegel to publish under the above title a quarterly record of the work done in the Royal Zoological Museum of the Netherlands at Leyden. The publication commenced in 1879, and the five yearly volumes before us, edited by Prof. Schlegel, will be one of the several enduring monuments to his memory. To all those interested in zoological research, the important treasures of the Leyden Museum are of necessity known. However indebted the Museum was to the well-known labours of Temminck, it is to the zeal and knowledge of Schlegel that it occupies its present high position among the museums of Europe. A very few words will show the importance from a zoological standpoint of these volumes, which contain on an average 250 pages each. The first volume contains descriptions of new species of mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, Crustacea, and worms. These descriptions are for the most part by the director of the Museum and his Assistants, but help seems also welcomed from every hand, and the well-known names of R. B. Sharpe, P. Herbert Carpenter, Dr. D. Sharpe, Rev. H. S. Gorham, Prof. J. O. Westwood, occur among the British contributors. Besides containing numerous diagnoses of new species, these notes also from time to time present us with very important critical essays. Thus, in vol. i. Dr. A. A. W. Hubrecht's “Genera of European Nemerteans critically revised, with Descriptions of New Species,” with a first appendix in vol. ii., is of great interest. It gives, so far as European forms are concerned, a classification of the genera and details of the species found at Naples. With regard to a genus of De Blainville, Lobilabrum, which was founded on a. single specimen of the species L. astrearum, and which has never been again met with, the following instructive facts are recorded. This genus was easily distinguished from all others by the possession of a blunt snout with two horizontal lips at the extremity, both of them bilobed, and apparently with tentacles. The slit between the lips was described as being a continuation of the lateral fissures of both sides of the head. In other respects the genus bore a strong resemblance to species of Lineiis or Cerebratulus living in the same localities. One day at Naples Dr. Hubrecht was fortunate enough to come across a second specimen of this rare worm, which, like De Blainville's specimen, was dredged from a bottom covered with bivalve shells. It was duly figured and preserved, and longitudinal sections were made of its curious snout. Soon after he was struck by the extraordinary resemblance in habitatwhich existed between another Nemertean (whose anterior extremity exactly answered to that of a Lineüs or Cerebratulus, and carried two well-pronounced fissures), and this single specimen of Lobilabrum. Once the doubt was raised, Dr. Hubrecht pursued the investigation by purposely cutting off the tip of the snout in one of the last-mentioned species, in a direction vertical to the body axis. Immediately the curious arrangement of the lobed and tentaculated lips which had hitherto been limited to the genus Lobilabrum appeared, the animal operated on lived for several weeks, and afterwards longitudinal sections showed that an epidermal covering had made its appearance identical with what had been found in the Lobilabrum specimen. Considering these results with the fact of the habitat amongst bivalve shells, Dr. Hubrecht concluded that the genus of De Blainville had been founded on a specimen the tip of whose snout had been severed by an oyster into whose open shell it was stealthily trying to penetrate.