1898.] Welch. — Land- Shell ''Pockets'' 072 Sand-Dunes, 79 



on the edge of the sand-hills where tide and river meet. I 

 have taken seven or eight species out of this debris, and some 

 of them also in a large " pocket " not far from the river-bank, 

 including a fresh-water species — Hydrobia — in 1893. This 

 turned out to be Hydrobia Jejikind (and a new record for 

 Ireland^) on the examination of more perfect specimens 

 which I obtained alive, swarming in little brackish pools on 

 the swampy edges of the river near there in July, 1897. 



During the Field Club excursion to Bundoran and Sligo 

 in July, 1892, Mr. Praeger collected a handful or two of drift 

 material at high-water mark on the sand-hills at the mouth 

 of the Erne ; this yielded eighteen species of land-shells, and 

 as no fresh-water shells likely to come from higher reaches of 

 the river were found with them, they were all likely swept 

 into the river from the dunes or their swampy margins. ^ 



At Portsalon in 1893 Mr. R. D. Darbishire noticed, as he 

 had previously done at other places, many little shells, beetles, 

 &c., derived from debris of the river and the dunes, drifting 

 into a little hollow in the latter, and in the Journal of 

 Co7tchology, vol. 7, p. 196, Mr. R. Standen, who was with him 

 at the time, describes the manner in which they saw them 

 being collected together b}^ the wind. From a table-spoonful 

 of the finer material, the result of a careful sieving of about a 

 pint which removed the sand and all shells larger than 

 Cochlicopa, they obtained 476 specimens of 15 species, and 

 several of these proved to be albino specimens (not previously 

 known) of Vertigo ptisiila, an exceedingly rare species. Not 

 far from this, on the low cliffs of quartzite near the hotel, 

 which rise about 20 feet above the sea, I noticed a few years 

 later a mass of earthy sand containing mau}^ land-shells 

 falling out of the thickly matted mass of roots of Ivy and 

 Bramble with which the little cliffs are covered. There must 

 have been tens of this material tumbling down and mixing 

 with the marine shells on the beach below in a little gully not 

 far above high-water mark. A quantity of this sieved and 

 brought home yielded 18 species, a few like Helix hortensis 2iVL^ 

 Vertigo S2ibstriata being local and rare, and while some of 

 them I know live among the vegetation on the cliffs, others 

 were carried there by the wind, with the sand from the dunes 

 close at hand. 



* See Irish Naturalist^ 1897, p. 234. ^ Irish Naturalist^ 1892, p. 171, 



