MADEIRAN GROUP. 157 



nobody should have yet placed upon record its occurrence in 

 Madeira proper, — though Mr. Lowe, at all events, was perfectly 

 well aware that it is far from uncommon near Porto Moniz on 

 the north-western coast of that island. This fact must conse- 

 quently have escaped his memory, when compiling (in 1852) 

 his last enumeration of the land-shells of the archipelago. On 

 the Southern Deserta I have myself met with it sparingly, and I 

 have seen a few other examples which had been obtained from 

 thence by the Baron Paiva, — who, by the bye, has fallen into 

 the unaccountable error of citing it as existing in a subfossil 

 state only on that remote rock. 1 



In a subfossil condition the H. abjecta is most abundant in 

 the calcareous deposits of Porto Santo ; and although I have 

 not myself met with it (subfossilized) except in that island, and 

 have no other evidence of its occurrence elsewhere, it is never- 

 theless recorded by the Baron Paiva to be found sparingly at 

 Canical, — which, considering its existence in a recent state on 

 the northern coast of Madeira proper, is far from unlikely. 



The H. abjecta is an extremely thick and solid little shell, 

 globose-conical in outline, with an open and conspicuous 

 (though by no means large) perforation, and extremely rough 

 in sculpture, — being coarsely granulated all over (though par- 

 ticularly above), and with strong, irregular, subcontinent, 

 transverse costate lines. Its peristome is white, expanded, con- 

 tinuous, and almost circular ; its colour is a brownish-white 

 (sometimes with a few paler radiating lines), passing into a 

 reddish brown ; and its volutions are tumid and prominent, 

 though not exactly (at all events in the normal state) keeled. 

 There is, however, a phasis of the shell (corresponding with the 

 ' /3. candisata ' of this catalogue) in which the form is rather 

 more flattened and the keel is a trifle more expressed ; but it 

 merges so gradually into the other that it can scarcely be looked 

 upon as a permanent ' variety ' (properly so called); and the 

 examples from the Southern Deserta (the ' 7. nesiotes ' of the 

 present list) are, on the average, a little smaller and less conical 

 than the ordinary Madeiran and Porto-Santan ones, somewhat 

 more evidently keeled, and not quite so roughly granulated. 

 Beyond these two forms (the second of which I should not have 



1 I have no evidence that the H. abjecta has been observed in a subfossil 

 condition at all, hitherto, on the Southern Deserta, though it is extremely 

 probable that sooner or later it will be found there. For the Baron Paiva's 

 assertion that it is only subfossil on that island (' nee recens hodie inventa '), 

 whereas to my own knowledge he procured from thence a certain number of 

 living exannples, added to the complete confusion of his ideas in regarding 

 the Porto-Santan H. commixta as conspecitic with the South-Desertan //. ab- 

 jecta (the former of which he also misquotes as subfossilized !), renders his 

 evidence altogether contradictorv and valueless. 



