188 



Land'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 7. 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 I. 

 communis of the Index to Wood's Supplement and of 

 Brown's Illustrations ; the young has been figured and 

 described by Reeve as /. Smithies. 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 Swainson 

 (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 beach 

 at Kilkee in county Clare, not one of them containing 



