18970 179 



IL— IvAND AND FRESHWATER MOIvI^UvSCA OF THE 



BALI.YCASTLE DISTRICT. 



BY UONKL E. ADAMS, B.A. 



Having heard such glowing accounts of the expedition to 

 Ballycastle last September, undertaken by some members of 

 the Conchological Society, I was very pleased when I was 

 asked to join the same party in May of this year, as I 

 particularly wished to study the slugs of the district. 



The geology of the district has been full}' dealt with else- 

 where, so I will only mention, for the benefit of those who 

 may come to the same locality in search of shells, that the 

 whole of the district is not productive, the greater part con- 

 sisting of extensive moorlands and peat bogs. The wooded 

 glens in the valleys, and the landslips and bays on the coast, 

 are the only spots where collecting is profitable. The dis- 

 tances between these spots are usually too great to work 

 from a head-quarters by walking, and necessitate a car or a 

 cycle. For the benefit of the cyclist I may say that the surface 

 of the roads is good, and the gradients usually moderate. 



Rathlin Island having been visited only once by a 

 conchologist (Mr. R. Welch, who took 4 species in 1889), I 

 give separately the list of the 34 species which we obtained 

 from this isolated and often inaccessible spot. It must not 

 be supposed that this list is exhaustive, as we only had a few 

 hours on the island, and those on a very hot dry day, after a 

 prolonged drought — which, by the way, continued to the end 

 of our trip in spite of many and fervent prayers for rain — nor 

 was more than a small portion of the island explored. After 

 landing at Ushet Point, in spite of the efforts of a formidable 

 Irish bull to repel the invading Saxons, we worked in more 

 or less parallel lines over the hill to Ushet I^ough by the 

 crannoge, and thence along the cliffs to Church Bay, further 

 than which we did not go. 



It must be remembered, too, that throughout this paper 

 the terms "common," **rare," &c., merely represent the 

 circumstances of our particular visit, and not necessarily the 

 average state of things. 



For the sake of conformity to Mr. Standen's previous list in 

 this journal (January, 1897), I use the nomenclature of Dr. 

 Scharff 's " Irish Land and Freshwater Mollusca,'* 



