188 lANTHINID^. 



Laud's End. He says it is there " occasionally wafted, 

 by a gentle south-west wind, in prodigious fleets, all 

 alive, and borne upon the water by their clusters of tough 

 bubble -like vesicles. By the retreating waves most of 

 them are carried back into the ocean ; so that it re- 

 quires a fortunate combination of tide, wind, and wave 

 to see them in all their splendour. This mostly happens 

 about the months of July and August. The fishermen's 

 wives call them bullhorns.^'' According to M. Drouet 

 the inhabitants of Pico in the Western Isles give these 

 shellfish the name of '^ agoa viva,^' and pretend that 

 they fasten themselves on the limbs of persons bathing. 

 Did they not mean the Physalia, or some animal of the 

 Medusa kind? 



I do not consider the present species the Helix jan- 

 thina of Linne or I. fragilis (afterwards communis) of 

 Lamarck. That has a smaller and lilac-coloured shell, 

 with a sharp peripheral keel; and it is exotic. Our 

 shell is the /. Brittanica of Leach's later MS., and /. 

 communis of the Index to Wood's Supplement and of 

 Brown's Illustrations ; the young has been figured and 

 described by Reeve as /. Smithi'ce. One manuscript 

 name is as good as another; in adopting rotundata I 

 select the oldest. 



Other species which have been carried northwards by 

 the Gulf-stream, and driven ashore on our southern and 

 western coasts, are /. communis, I. globosa of Sn^ainson 

 (a tropical species), /. pallida of Harvey (Straits of 

 Magellan) , and /. exigua of Bruguiere, from Chili and 

 the South Atlantic. With respect to the last species, 

 the late Professor Harvey told me that he once received 

 a box of specimens, at least 500 in number, which a 

 relation of his had picked up in a single day on the l)each 

 at Kilkee in county Clare, not one of them containing 



