TRANSACTIONS OF WAGNER 

 97 



TERTIARY FAUNA OF FLORIDA 



FAMILY PSAMMOBIID^. 



The species belonging to this group were referred to Tellina, Solcn, etc., 

 by the earlier writers. A smooth, rather inflated species (referred by Hanley 

 to Psammot&a serotina Lam.) was described by Rumphius in 1704 under the 

 name of Tellina gari. The specific name here is the genitive case of a Latin 

 noun of the second declension, Garum, meaning a sauce or pickle made of shell- 

 fish. As the Amboyna species was used in a similar way (the recipe for the 

 method is given by Rumphius) he very appropriately used the classical word, 

 properly inflected, for his nomen triviale. The name was accepted without 

 change by Linnaeus in 1758, and the species placed in his genus Tellina. Lin- 

 naeus, as was his habit when he did not possess a type of one of his species, 

 referred to several figures in illustration of Tellina gari, and, as frequently 

 happened, these figures did not both represent the same species. That of 

 Rumphius must obviously be taken as typical, while another, in a plate of 

 Argenville (pi. 26, fig. i), also represents a smooth species, but is hardly iden- 

 tifiable. Later, in the Museum Ulrica?, in 1762, Linnanis described a common 

 north European shell, Ps. feroensis * of authors, under the name of Tellina 

 gari, though he had a year previously named the former Tellina incarnata; 

 notwithstanding it was not his Tellina incarnata of 1758, named in the Sys- 

 tema Natures. 



In 1817 Schumacher subdivided the Linnaean Tellinas and erected, upon 

 the Tellina gari (Linne, 1762; not of 1758, or of Rumphius) and another 

 shell, the Tellina papyracea of Spengler, 1798, a genus which he called Gari, 

 apparently not recognizing the Latinity of this word and without correcting 

 the inflection. As he figures for his " Section a" of this new genus the Ps. 

 feroensis, it must be taken as his type. The other species is the Tellina planata 

 (L.) of authors, figured by Lister. The name gari in this form is plainly 

 inadmissible for a generic name. Before any one corrected the erroneous in- 

 flection, Lamarck proposed the name Psammobia for a mixed group, including 

 species related to the original Tellina gari (but not including gari itself) and 

 others now referred to Macoma, but without indicating a type. For the true 

 gari (under the names of violacea and serotina} and others he proposed the 

 genus Psammotcea at the same time. In 1822 Bowdich, a pupil of Lamarck, 

 published his " Elements of Conchology," in which the genus Psammobia is 

 illustrated by a figure of P. feroensis, which may be regarded as fixing the type. 



* Misprinted fervensis in Gmelin, and sometimes so quoted by authors. It is feroensis, 

 from the Faeroe Islands, not from Ferro Island. 



