On a new and peculiar freshwater isopod from Mount Kosciusko
Abstract
Towards the end of 1889 I received from the Trustees of the Australian Museum, Sydney, a small collection of Australian Crustacea, containing among others, some terrestrial and freshwater species collected by Mr. R. Helms while on an expedition to Mount Kosciusko on behalf of the Museum. Among these I at once saw that one was quite different from any of the terrestrial and fresh-water Crustacea previously described from Australia, and that it belonged to a genus Phreatoicus established by myself in 1882, for a peculiar blind subterranean Isopod found in wells in Canterbury, New Zealand. This genus was of special interest both because of the situation in which the original species was found, and because it combined characters belonging to several different families, and was also, to some extent, intermediate between the Isopoda and the Amphipoda The discovery of a species belonging to the same genus in such a widely remote situation as Mount Kosciusko, and living under such different conditions is therefore of peculiar interest,
