By Charles Chilton, M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S.

[Read before the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, 1st December, 1909.]

In the year 1901 I published in the “Transactions of the Linnean Society” an account of the terrestrial Isopoda of New Zealand. Since then numerous additional facts have become known, and some additional species have been found; moreover, during the interval several important works dealing with certain sections of the group have appeared. It seems desirable, therefore, to collect this additional information together for the advantage of future workers. In some of the genera a thorough revision of the species is necessary; but this would entail more time than can be devoted to the matter at present, and I must content myself with merely indicating some of the questions that require solution. For the same reason descriptions of some new species are held over.

The list published in 1901 contained twenty-seven species in thirteen genera, only three or four being uncertain species. Included in the list, however, were three species which are now known to have been accidentally introduced by man, and which must therefore be omitted from the list of New Zealand species. These are Porcellio scaber, Latr., Metoponorthus pruinosus, Brandt, and Armadillidium vulgare, Latr. Porcellio scaber is extremely common all over New Zealand, and has spread far from inhabited places, though it has not often been found actually in the native bush. Of Metoponorthus pruinosus I (1905, p. 431, and 1906A, p. 64) have had specimens only from Rissington, in Hawke's Bay, though a specimen had apparently been gathered in New Zealand before 1847, for it was included in White's list published in that year, and was afterwards described by Miers under the name Porcellio zealandicus; Armadillidium vulgare is common in the town of Nelson, and I have one specimen from Mount Egmont, and more recently specimens from a garden at Sumner, Canterbury: but neither of the last two species appears to have spread in New Zealand in the same way as Porcellio scaber has done.

A few additional species have been added to the list of those found in the New Zealand region, from specimens gathered in the subantarctic islands to the south of New Zealand—viz., Scyphoniscus magnus, Chilton, Haplophthalmus australis, Chilton, Trichoniscus magellanicus, (Dana); while Oniscus novœ-zealandiœ, Filho, proves to be a separate species of Deto, and not identical with Deto aucklandiœ, as I previously thought it might be.

In a paper published at Copenhagen in 1904 Budde-Lund has given a revision of the Spherilloninœ, and in the genus Spherillo he includes a large number of species from New Zealand, Polynesia, and elsewhere which were previously included under Armadillo, while he also describes some new species from New Zealand under different genera of the subfamily. I do not fully understand the characters by which Budde-Lund separates Spherillo from Armadillo, and, as there is some doubt whether the name Spherillo is available for the use Budde-Lund makes of it, I give the species under Cubaris, a name that has priority, and has already been used by Stebbing (1900, p. 649) for species which apparently would be placed under Spherillo by Budde-Lund. In his paper Budde-Lund describes