1898] 123 



SOME NEW BOOKS 



Australian Tertiary Mollusca 



Catalogue of Tertiary Mollusca in the Department of Geology, British 

 Museum (Natural History). Part I. The Australian Tertiary Mollusca. By G. F. 

 Harris. Pp. xxvi + 407, 8 pis. London : Trustees of the British Museum, 1897. 

 Price, 10s. 



In the long series of catalogues issued by the Geological Department 

 of the British Museum (Natural History) the Mollusca have scarcely 

 received their fair share of attention, though they have been well 

 treated as compared with some other groups of Invertebrata. The 

 volume liefore us inaugurates a new series, destined to treat of the 

 fossil Mollusca of different geographical regions. The first to be 

 undertaken is Australasia, which is here regarded as including " the 

 Australian Continent, Tasmania, 'New Zealand, and the Chatham 

 Islands," and its Tertiary Mollusca present many interesting features 

 largely due to the perfect preservation of a large variety of forms. 



Dr Woodward is to be congratulated on having enlisted the 

 services of so painstaking and philosophical a conchologist as j\Ir 

 G. F. Harris for this work. To look over a collection, identify all 

 the forms that can readily be determined, and assign new names to 

 the others, is one mode of making a catalogue, but it is a very 

 different and more arduous task to compare carefully all the related 

 forms with each other, and to work out the relationships in regard to 

 growth and development between them, so as to ascertain which are 

 to be regarded as stages in the evolution of the individual and which 

 as possible stages in the phylogeny of the group. Mr Harris has 

 chosen this better part and he has had his reward, for his catalogue is 

 no mere list of names and diagnoses, interesting only as material for 

 further investigation — as raw material for scientific work — like too 

 many lists. It is a text-book which must be studied by every one 

 who wishes to be au courant with recent advances in the morphology 

 and morphogeny of the shell. If some other workers would imitate 

 his example we should soon cease to hear conchology spoken of as 

 intellectually on a par with the collecting of postage stamps. 



Let us illustrate these remarks by a few examples taken from the 

 work itself. The names adopted for different stages of growth are in 

 general those of Hyatt, as modified by Buckman and Bather, and it is 

 pointed out that many characters which have commonly been re- 

 garded as differentiating genera and species are in reality indications 

 of stages of growth or mere individual peculiarities. In the account 

 of Conus ciispidatus, for example, it is shown that the elevation of the 

 spire belongs to this latter category. 



In the family Pleurotomidae, which is, comparatively speaking, of 

 modem origin, and is remarkable for the wonderful diversity of types 

 it has produced in a short space of geological time, there seem to be 



