Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2011
In a forthcoming paper, N. M. Khan gives a condition for a variety of commutative semigroups V to be saturated in the sense of Howie and Isbell (1967) (i.e. epis are onto for each S ∈ V). We show the necessity of the condition by constructing a non-saturated semigroup which is a member of every commutative variety not satisfying Khan's condition. This determination of the saturated varieties of commutative semigroups enables us then to prove that these varieties form a sublattice of the lattice of varieties of all commutative semigroups.