441 Mr. L. lleeve on the Recent Tevebratulse. 



if the materials upon which it is raised are open to the suspicion 

 of being unsound in fact, in principle, in detail ? Prof. Suess 

 may delight, with great interest to himself, and with much ad- 

 vantage to science, in the pleasures of generalization ; it is 

 always pleasant 



" To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy ; " 



but he who wishes to be secure must not shirk the drudgery, 

 necessary for scientific accuracy, of examining and testing de- 

 tails. The catalogues from which the greater part of Prof. 

 Suess's statements are taken are, I repeat, excellent ; but does 

 it follow that they are faultless ? The erroneous statements 

 (few, indeed, in number) which have been taken along with the 

 true ones have been corrected by subsequent research, and 

 would have been corrected, had opportunity offered, by the 

 authors themselves. The alleged error in which Prof. Suess 

 says I am myself involved turns out to be a mare^s nest. I 

 announced, in my ' Revision,' that the repetition, in ' Moll. Voy. 

 Samarang,' of the same habitat and bathymetrical particulars 

 for T. capensis {Kraussia Deshayesii, Dav.) and T. abyssicola must 

 surely be an error. It will presently be shown, on unimpeach- 

 able testimony, that the original statement is the correct one. 



Prof. Suess has not much to complain of. There are only 

 four, out of the lai-ge and interesting number of facts due to 

 English authors, upon which I dispute his accuracy : — 



1 . Prof. Suess says, " Mr. Reeve states that Waltonia Valen- 

 ciennesii, Dav., is identical with Terebratella Evansii," which is 

 true enough ; but it is not in reference to this identity that I 

 go on to remark, "and Prof. Suess might have detected this, 

 even without any examination of the specimen, from Mr. David- 

 son's excellent figures of it." I make this remark in reference 

 to the extraordinary view, which I am sorry to see maintained, 

 that Waltonia is an Argiope. I have been to Paris to examine 

 the Waltonia, but it was not to be found. The mutilation of 

 the loop has nothing to do with the question. The figure, even 

 with the ascending branches and horizontal bars of the loop 

 broken away, shows that it is no Argiope, while there are clearly 

 indications of its being a Terebratella Evansii. I declare that 

 this was my conviction on first examining the figures and descrip- 

 tion. I communicated my suspicions to Mr. Davidson ; he 

 confirmed them. The figure shows, says Prof. Suess, that the 

 specimen is an abnormal one, the plaits of which do not reach 

 the umbo. What I term " obviously a blunder " — using the 

 word, not offensively, but as indicating a mistake which it would 

 be scarcely courteous to refute — is the slip of Prof. Suess in mis- 

 taking the impress of these plaits for internal apophysial septa. 



