A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON THE SIM-PLE GENERA OF THE MADREPORARIA FUNGIDA, WITH A TENTATIVE CLASSIFICATION. " By T. Wayland Vaughan, Custodian, Madreporian Corals. INTRODUCTION. CAUSES THAT LED TO THIS COMPILATION AND THE ATTEMPTED CLASSIFICATION. The foUowino^ paper has grown out of the necessities of my work on the fossil corals of North America and the study of the recent Fungid corals in the United States National Museum. In my Some Cretaceous and Eocene corals from Jamaica ^' I had to describe simple Fungid corals belonging to three different genera; other species of Fungids had to ))e considered in my Corals of the Buda Limestone (Texas)'"; and they are well represented in collections of Tertiary corals that I am at present studying for the United States Geological Survey.'^ The last comprehensive attempt at the classification of these corals is that of Duncan, in his Revision of the Families and Genera of the Madreporaria.*' This work is very faulty, and is often insufficient for the determination of the genera described in it. I was therefore unable to identify the genera to which some of the specimens referred to me belonged, even after I had collected the descriptions of those proposed since 1884. Furthermore, the original generic diagnoses were often inadequate and type-species had not been designated — in fact, it not onlj^ seemed, but actually is, hopeless, to find in the litera-ture the differential characters of man}" of the proposed genera. "Published by permission of the Director of the U. S. Geological Survey. &Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., XXXIV, 1899, pp. 242-246. ► c\J. S. Geol. Surv. Bull., No. 205, 1903, pp. 39, 40. d Tertiary corals of North America. Part II. Faunas of the Post-Eocene forma-tions of the eastern and southeastern United States and the Tertiaries of the West Indies, U. S. Geol. Surv. Mon., vol. . (In preparation.) «Journ. Linn. Soc. London, Zool., XVIII, 1884. Proceedings U. S. National Museum, Vol. XXVIII— No. 1401. 371
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