TOE NAUTILUS. 125 



Culebra Cut, 1.00 to 2CO feet above mean tide level. There, in 

 squeezed-iip marine strata, easily recognizable marine species may 

 be found in considerable number?. Some are. perhaps, as old as the 

 Tertiary period, but many of them can be duplicated, alive, on the 

 Pacific beaches. Coral is found 2G2 feet above present mean tide. 

 Fifteen miles away in the Chagres basin marine deposits are also 

 found. Sometime, not so very long ago, (here was an open strait 

 where the I.slhimis now is. Is the Isthmus younger, very much 

 younger, than scientifically supposed? How much younger? Is 

 there any evidence not of its age but of its youth, to be found in 

 the five tons of shell-bearing material sent to Washington by the 

 diggers in Culebra Cut? I don't know. I'm only a gatherer of 

 shells with tin imagination and some disposition to ask questions. 



ON SOME CUBAN UEOCOPTIDJE. 



BY II. A. P1LSBRY. 



The following notes relate to new or rare species collected by the 

 writer in 1904. My -journey was a rather rapid one, undertaken 

 with the object of seeing something of the mollusk fauna of the 

 central part of the island, as nearly all the Cuban shells I had studied 

 had been taken in the relatively far richer and more frequently ex- 

 plored regions from Havana Province west, and in Santiago Prov- 

 ince, or Oriente as it is now called. 



My route was from Havana to Cienfuegos by rail, thence to 

 Casilda, the Port of Trinidad, by the Menendez steamship line, 

 thence to Tunas de Zaza on the south coast; by rail then to Sancti 

 Spirilus, eastward to Majagua in Ca maguey Province, and return 

 by way of Matanzas. Collecting was done at the places mentioned 

 as well as at many places along the route, and others within a day's 

 journey on foot or mule from those named. 



Around Havana, Matanzas, etc., various well-known Urocopti'dee 

 were taken which call for no special notice, and also several forms 

 of the U. elegans group a very difficult series, not yet worked up, 

 and extremely abundant in the environs of Matanzas and in Havana 

 Province. Urocoptis caret P. & H., [7. longa P. & II., and the fol- 

 lowing species may be mentioned among the new forms taken. 



