oe Neo: 
Vor. XI. JUNE, 1897. No. 2. 
HELICINA DYSONI. 
BY CHARLES T. SIMPSON. 
While collecting shells in the Island of Utilla, on the north coast 
of Honduras, I frequently visited a Brickly Thatch palm grove’ 
which lay on the south shore. The Brickly Thatch is a curious, 
small palm, with straight, slender stems, a little larger than one’s 
wrist, and about twenty feet in height, surmounted by a crown of 
shining, fan-shaped leaves. ‘The bases of these trees are slightly en- 
larged, and they stand on a cone of stilted roots, which, with the 
soil and rubbish among them, fill the conical space almost solid. 
They grow thickly to the exclusion of all other vegetation, and the 
curious bunches of roots completely fill the space on the ground and 
make it quite difficult and awkward to get around. Under the al- 
most twilight of this dense copse I found excellent collecting, and I 
there discovered Colobostylus andrewse, Cylindrella bourquignatiana 
and several other new species. Among other shells I kept finding 
specimens of the pretty little Helicina dysoni, but always dead and. 
generally faded. An enterprising collector is never satisfied with 
dead shells, and I searched everywhere to find this mollusk alive— 
under the dead, fallen palm leaves, in what rubbish lay around, on 
the stems of the palms, and among their tough, matted roots—but 
in vain, and I finally concluded that the colony, of which these were 
remnants, had either died out or migrated. 
One day I visited a part of the grove that I had not seen before, 
a spot at its edge, and here I found a single Jiving tree which had 
1 Thrinax radiata. 
