102 EECORDS OF THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEtJM. 



and Tasniani.iu types of Orthoptera and Coleoptera* suggests 

 that the alpine fauna of Mt. Kosciusko is primarily or spccitically 

 Tasnianian and secondarily or generically Antarctic. This 

 generalisation accords perfectly with the mollusca 1 am about to 

 discuss. The Tasnianian colony left stranded on the Kosciusko 

 heights demands a former cold period to explain their existence 

 there as clearly as does a moraine left liy a vanished glacier. Had 

 not geologists furnished evidence of an Australian Glacier Epoch, 

 then biologists would have had to invent on their own account a 

 theory of such. 



As the molluscan collection has not reached me whole, these 

 observations make no pretence to exhaust the subject, the interest 

 attending which justifies the publication of data, however 

 fragmentary. On the return of Mr. Helms from his first trip to 

 Mt. Kosciusko, a single species of his molluscan captures was at 

 once entrusted to me, though not then engaged in the Museum 

 service, for description. This was an unfigured species, then 

 only recorded as Tasnianian, which I identified,! with some 

 hesitation from insufficent data as Cystopelta pettei'di, Tate. 

 These doubts were dispelled J afterwards by an examination of 

 living specimens in their type locality. Since then, this species 

 has been traced in Victoria to Ballaarat (Musson), and Loch, 

 (Frost) ; in New South Wales to the Kurrajong Hills (Musson), 

 Mount Wilson (J. 0. Cox), and Blackheath (Quaife). 



On resuming the examination of the Kosciusko mollusca five 

 years afterwards two new species first claimed my attention. 



Edodonta nivea, 11. S2}. 



(Plate XXIII., Figs. 5, 6, and 7). 



Shell, white, thin, small, shining, flattened, involute, and 

 perforate. Whorls, three, closely coiled, the earlier enrolled 

 within the latter and almost concealed by them. Spii^e, a shallow 

 crater, one third of the shell's major diameter, from the floor of 

 •which the whorls centrifugally ascend. Umbilicus, narrow, one 

 eighth of the shell's major diameter, a hollow screw showing the 

 revolutions of two whorls. Sculpture, last whorl perpendicularly 

 crossed by 115 sharp costje diminishing in size and approaching 

 one another at the suture and umbilicus ; on the vertex and 

 base the interstices, from three to five times the breadth of the 

 intervening costa^, are crossed by minute spiral I'aised hair lines 

 forming meshes which are in turn crossed by three or four most 

 minute longitudinal threads ; in the peripheral zone the spiral 



* Op. cit., iv., p. 398. 



t Proc. Linn. Soc. N.S.W., (2) v., pp. 4-1-10, pi. i. 



X Op. cit., vi., p. 24. 



