226 Naturalist at Large 



presence of good soil. Years ago it became clear to me that 

 the hammocks were going to be cut over for plantations and 

 the snails would disappear. In fact, way back when I was 

 a boy I observed "Saws," as the Negroes from the Bahamas 

 are called down in the Miami area, using long bamboos to 

 knock the snails out of the trees of the Great Brickell 

 Hammock. They used them for fish bait. 



I made up my mind to get a representation of the snails 

 from every hammock within the Umits of their distribution, 

 roughly from south of a line drawn from Fort Lauderdale 

 westward across the state. When I started out, our collec- 

 tion of these marvelously beautiful creatures was but a few 

 hundred, whereas today we have 43,235 individuals in the 

 collection from 490 localities, representing 6$ named forms, 

 with 48 types. For anyone with an eye for beauty, it is a joy 

 to collect Ligs. The whole group of shells is in a state of 

 flux, evolutionarily speaking, and there are over 60 color 

 varieties. Some are pure white with pink stripes, some white 

 with green, some exactly Hke tortoise shell, some pure 

 white, varying also in size and form. These creatures indeed 

 are so beautiful that a cult of Liguus collectors has come 

 into being and thousands of specimens have been gathered 

 up with no record whence they came. These are now re- 

 posing in the hands of people who do not appreciate the 

 story that they could tell if complete data had been kept 

 when they were gathered. Ligs have disappeared from many 

 localities where they were once abundant and I take satis- 

 faction in the fact that before they disappeared we got the 

 best collection of Liguus in the world. And none better 

 will ever be made. 



