66 Miscellaneous. 
prizes. The classificatory portion is necessarily a mere sketch ; but 
-it is clear, and illustrated with a considerable number of woodcuts, 
and Mr. Woodward has appended to it a useful table of the prin- 
cipal genera of shells, with indications of their respective number of 
species and their geographical distribution. A list of a few works 
of reference (which might have been enlarged with advantage) 
occupies the last page of the pamphlet, which ought to find a wide 
acceptance among young collectors. 
MISCELLANEOUS. 
The ‘* Crag Mollusca.” 
To the Editors of the ‘ Annals and Magazine of Natural History. 
GrnrtLemeNn,—A shell abundant in the Red Crag of Suffolk and 
Essex was figured by Sowerby, in ‘ Mineral Conchology ’ for 1823 
(tab. 411. fig. 2), as Murew alveolatus, and a variety of it (tab, 414. 
fig. 1) as Bueccinum tetragonum. Both, together with a series of 
varieties connecting them, were figured by my father in the ‘ Crag 
Mollusca,’ issued by the Paleontographical Society for 1847, under 
the name of Purpura tetragona, by which the shell has now been 
long known. It has been generally regarded, by foreign and English 
authors alike, as not living; but in the list to Prof. Prestwich’s paper 
on the Red Crag (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxvii. p. 490) it is 
called a variety of Purpura lapillus, on the authority, I believe, of 
Dr. J. Gwyn Jeffreys. 
I have found in profusion, in the recent state, on Felixstow beach, 
a shell undistinguishable from the most abundant variety of P. tretra- 
gona. It is certainly not any variety of P. lapillus, but appears to 
be a smooth variety of the common British shell Murea erinaceus, 
in which opinion, as well as in that of its identity with the Crag 
Purpura tetragona, Mr. Robert Bell, who has an intimate acquaintance 
with the Crag Mollusca, concurs. 
This variety of Murex erinaceus was not known to my father, and 
therefore was not recognized by him; but having once seen a speci- 
men of the common form of that species in a collection from the 
Fluvio-marine Crag of Bramerton, he introduced it, but without any 
figure, at p. 39 of his original work, as a Crag species; and the 
specimen having been lost, he, in the first supplement to that work 
(tab. ii. fig. 11), gave the representation of a recent specimen of 
this form, in order that Murew erinaceus might appear as a Crag 
mollusk. 
Under the guise of Purpura tetragona, however, it appears to me 
to have been an abundant shell both of the oldest (2. e. Walton) 
and medial (7. ¢. Sutton) parts of the Red Crag (and not particularly 
rare in the Crag jaune and Crag gris of Antwerp, according to Nyst) ; 
but in the Fluvio-marine part of this crag, from which it was that 
