242 THE DISPERSAL OF SHELLS. 



I have no means of indicating the exact range of H. 

 pomatia in this country ; it seems to be confined for the 

 most part to chalky soils. Jeffreys mentions its occur- 

 rence in woods, hedge-banks, and uncultivated places 

 in Surrey, Hertford, Kent, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, 

 and Gloucestershire ; the Leeds Census records it for 

 the additional counties of Hampshire, Sussex, and 

 Bedfordshire, and the creature, as we have seen, is said 

 to have been found in several other counties. 



It seems useless, at this time, to offer a decided 

 opinion as to whether the animal is really indigenous to 

 our soil or not : the doctors have differed, and there 

 appears to be no actual evidence on either side ; the 

 weight of opinion, however, as far as conchological 

 authors are concerned, has for a long time favoured the 

 creature's indigenousness, and the absence of any sug- 

 gestion that it was foreign to our fauna in the works, now 

 more than two hundred years old, of Merret and Lister 

 certainly seems to support this view, which was held, we 

 have seen, by Leach, Turton, Gray, Forbes, Jeffreys, etc. 

 On the other hand, we have also seen that Pennant and 

 Da Costa, who wrote more than a century ago, both 

 stated positively that the creature was a naturalized 

 species, and they were followed in this view by 

 more than one writer, and even by the illustrious 

 Montagu. When a species originally introduced by 

 man establishes itself in a new country, subsequent 

 naturalists, in the absence of records, will always be 

 likely to mistake it for an aboriginal inhabitant of that 

 region, especially if the creature has happened to stray 



