Fig. 5.—The African fresh-water jelly-fish (Limnocnida) found in Tanganyika, Victoria Nyanza, and the Niger.
And now we have just been reminded of Limnocodium, the Regents Park jelly-fish, from a remote and unexpected source. A thousand miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang River, in China, in the province of Hupi, the Japanese captain of a river steamer, plying there and belonging to a Japanese company, captured ten jelly-fish in the muddy waters of the river. He brought them home, preserved, I suppose, in alcohol or formalin, and they have been described by Dr. Oka, a Japanese zoologist of Tokio, in a publication bearing the Latin title Annotationes Zoologicæ niponenses, issued in December 1907. European sea captains have not rarely been ardent naturalists, but I think the Japanese is the first captain of a river steamboat who has discovered a new animal on his beat. I have not heard of Mississippi steamboat captains amusing themselves in this way—other rivers, other tastes.
Dr. Oka describes the jelly-fish thus brought to him as a Limnocodium, differing in a few details from that of Regent’s Park, so that he distinguishes this Chinese species as Limnocodium Kawaii, naming it after the naturalist captain, who must have a rare taste for picking up strange and new things, and a rare goodwill in bringing them home with him. So here is another fresh-water jelly-fish, for it is not the same as the Regent’s Park one, though closely like it. Possibly Limnocodium is an Asiatic genus, and the original Sowerby’s Limnocodium will be found in another Chinese river. But it may prove to be South American, as is the water-lily Victoria regia.
A very small fresh-water jelly-fish was found some twelve years ago—in 1897—in the Delaware River at Philadelphia, United States, and was lately described by the well-known naturalist, Mr. Potts. It was budded off from a very minute polyp resembling that found in the Regent’s Park, but the jelly-fish was totally different from Limnocodium. Only four or five specimens of this jelly-fish have ever been seen, and the Philadelphian naturalists ought certainly to look it up again.
An account of the Philadelphian jelly-fish and of other fresh-water jelly-fishes, with illustrative plates, will be found in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, 1906. Mr. Charles Boulenger has, in the same Journal, 1908, described yet another fresh-water jelly-fish from the Fayoum Lake in Egypt.