566 NOTES ON SPECIES OF CYPR^A, 



— " Remarks on Cyprese desci'ibed by Mr. Gray," in which the 

 following passage occurs: — "No. 33. C. piriformis is the C. 

 uDibilicata of Solander, and as such is mentioned in my Index to 

 the 3rd edition of Lister's Hist. Conch., see t. 667, fig. 12. It is 

 said in the Portland Catalogue, Lot 255, to inhabit the coasts of 

 Coromandel, and till after the publication of my Descriptive 

 Catalogue I never saw the shell." 



A footnote initialled G.B.S. (doubtless those of G. B. Sowerby, 

 one of the committee who conducted the Journal) is appended to 

 the above remarks, the opening sentence of which is as follows : — 

 ^' No. 33. I transcribe the following from my copy of Solander's 

 MS. to show that the C. pyriformis of Gray cannot be identical 

 with C. umhilicata of Solander." The long, narrow, brown teeth 

 crossing the base of C. j^yt'^fonnis do not appear to have been 

 noticed by Dillwyn, otherwise he could hardly have confused the 

 two species. However, as he says he had not seen C. iimbilicatd 

 when he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue, he had only Gray's 

 description to guide him ; nevertheless, meagre as that is, it 

 mentions the brown character of the teeth. 



Lister's Historia sive Synopsis Methodica Conchyliorum, 3rd 

 edition (1823) referred to by Dillwyn was not Dillwyn's Descrip- 

 tive Catalogue of Recent Shells (1817). The former was purely 

 an illustrated work, the latter only a Descriptive Catalogue. 



From the above-recorded quotations it appears that the 

 specific name umbilicata was given to a Cyprpea as a manuscript 

 name by Solander, long before Sowerby described what we now 

 know to be the Tasmanian species, though no doubt the same. 

 Dillwyn tells us in his Descriptive Catalogue of Recent Shells 

 (Vol. i. p. xi. of the catalogue of books consulted by him, dated 

 1826) that Solander's MSS. were manuscript descriptions of shells 

 by the late Mr. Solander, in the library of the Right Hon. Sir 

 Joseph Banks; but I am quite unable to discover the date thereof. 

 According to Hanley in Wood's Index Testaceologicus (new ed. 

 1856, on p. xix. of the summary of the principal abbreviations of 

 authors quoted from) Solander's manuscripts were never printed, 

 but several copies of them were made, presumably in writing. 



