THE NAUTILUS. 3 



CUBAN NOTES. 



BY J. IJ. HENDERSON, .IK. 



Mr. C. T. Simpson and the writer this winter yielded to the call 

 of the wild, and we have just concluded another of our collecting 

 orgies in the Antilles. This time we descended upon Cuba, and all 

 of those delights of the chase formerly experienced together in the 

 mountains of Jamaica and Haiti we renewed in this island of con- 

 chological joys. 



Now the collector with two months at his disposal can pretty well 

 clean up Jamaica, barring, of course, the rare ties and the elusive small 

 fry, but Cuba is an altogether different proposition. The island be- 

 comes surprisingly large after leaving Havana, and then it is only in 

 the mountains that the really good picking is to be found. Then, 

 too, the mountains seem always to be far away from the railroad or 

 the towns where accommodations are to be found. If all the exten- 

 sive plains and lowlands of Cuba could be eliminated by some Alad- 

 din's lamp process and the mountain systems shoved up together, as 

 they are in Jamaica, then indeed Cuba would present a field to the 

 snail-hunter that no other place on earth could equal. The moun- 

 tains are excessively rich in molluscan life, and the species found are 

 for the most part of exceptional beauty and interest. The lowlands 

 are not wholly without their mollusks, only there they are more 

 scattered and difficult to find. The range of the lowland species 

 seems to be much greater than that of the mountain forms. In fact 

 one may travel all day by train and still find quite the same species 

 of land shells. In the moutains, however, the distribution of species 

 is often very restricted, sometimes to one side only of one particular 

 hill. But as a rule a species occurring typically at a certain spot in 

 a range of mountains gradually changes through varietal forms as 

 one follows the range until it acquires a new name, and perhaps still 

 another one later on. Thus it is in Cuba there are so many species 

 of Urocoptis, of Chondropoma, of Helicina, Eutrochatella, etc., which 

 belong to strongly-defined groups having a central typical form. 

 One is constantly trying to verify a suspicion that the central typical 

 form represents the ancestor that lived upon the higher land and sur- 

 vived a subsidence of the lower country, and that the other forms of 

 the group are the descendants that have wandered away into new 



