OF CONCHOLOGY. 137 



AN ATTEMPT AT A REVISION OF THE TWO FAMILIES 

 STROMBIDiE AND APORRHAIDiE. 



BY W. M. GABB. 



A time-honored but none the less reprehensible custom has long 

 existed among the students of both recent and fossil conchology, 

 of using certain genera, as it were, as receptacles for all ambigu- 

 ous species which they were unable to assign to their proper 

 places. Among the unfortunate genera that have thus been so 

 overwhelmed with foreign forms that the original characters seem 

 in danger of being lost sight of, is Rostellaria. True this is not 

 even the worst case ; space would fail us, were we to attempt to 

 recount all the forms that have been called Fusus by the army 

 of careless authors ; and in Pyrula alone, one modern writer, 

 Reeve, includes representatives of several families, barely allied 

 even in outline. But our present purpose is only with the alate 

 shells that have been indiscriminately confounded with Rostella- 

 ria, Aporrhais, &c. 



In the two families above named, a minority of genera is still 

 living, and for this reason the families were unavoidably slighted 

 by H. and A. Adams, in which they were unnecessarily imitated 

 by their follower Chenu. The latter figures many extinct forms 

 and had here, as well as in several other instances, the oppor- 

 tunity for redeeming his, in many respects admirable, work from 

 its character of servile copying, by doing among the fossils what 

 the Adams' did among the recent shells. But with a lack of 

 originality that is to be regretted, he has contented himself by 

 taking the genera adopted by one or two leading systematists, 

 ranging everything under them, and thus frequently forcing 

 species into alliances that are as unnatural as they are inconsis- 

 tent with the present state of science. Up to the present time 

 no one author has collected the numerous genera that have been 

 described in either of the families under consideration ; and the 

 student must be either remarkably well read to know where to 

 find them all, or must lose much time picking them out from 

 among the mass of material that has been written, especially 



