A REVIEW OF liECENT AUSTRAIJAN 

 COXCHOf.OGY. 



(Presidential Address.) 



By John Shirley, D.Sc, F.M.S., 

 Principal, Teachers' Training College, Brisbane. 



(Delivered before the Royal Society of Queensland^ March 

 29th, 1915.) 



The conchologists of the world owe a debt of gratitude 

 to America for the production of a standard work on the 

 Mollusca. The publication of Tryon's Manual of the 

 Mollusca has placed our knowledge of the Gasteropoda, 

 Amphineura and Scaphopoda on a sound basis. The 

 specialist, who devotes himself to the determination of 

 species in these classes, has this work continually at his 

 elbow, and though he may find fault with a few minor 

 details, it is to him what the dictionary is to the beginner 

 in a new language. Recent species makers with Tryon's 

 Manual for reference are apt to talk from a height about 

 *' Tryon who hastily united species, which, though then 

 indefinite in literature were distinct in nature," or of the 

 slovenly work of early authors, as for instance the " care- 

 lessness and incapacity of Lovell Reeve," or to complain 

 that " having left his species in the Avrong genus, unfigured, 

 unlocalised, known and knowable onl}^ to those who saw 

 the type, Arthur Adams fortunately crowned his work 

 by the adoption of a preoccupied name " Of the known 

 marine mollusca of Queensland, it must not be forgotten 



