412 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
attributed.* The severity of the climate in that northern latitude 
and the hard living must, doubtless, be held responsible for its 
distorted aspect, and to the same causes, acting possibly a little 
less harshly, but still rendering the struggle for existence a 
severe one, must be attributed the abundant variation evident 
throughout the collection. 
To attempt to relegate the variations just chronicled to any 
of the two and twenty named varieties (so-called), which have 
been established for this species,t though quite in harmony 
with the views of a certain school of conchologists in this 
country and abroad, would be, to my thinking, not only absurd 
but impossible. For, supposing we do agree that the fulvous 
specimens, transparent through poverty of lime, and devoid of 
the customary markings, are the “‘var. Baylei, Lecoq.”; and 
that the rufous examples, which for the same causes in all save 
colour are identical with them, are to be estranged from them, 
and concealed under another varietal name, var. fusca, Feérus : 
granted all this, what is to be done with the adult individuals, 
both fulvous and rufous, that with middle age changed their 
condition of spotless and transparent youth for the blotched 
markings and opaque state of the normal shell? Are two 
brand-new varietal names to be invented for their special benefit ? 
Is it not rather time that these useless distinctions were con- 
signed to the oblivion of the (unscientific) past, more especially 
as so many of them were founded at a time when fixity of 
species was a current creed, and varietal names were established 
on such insufficient grounds as mere differences of colour or 
divergence in size from a purely arbitrary but supposedly fixed 
type ? 
Surely the state of our knowledge is sufficiently advanced to 
allow of certain variations being admitted as normal, so to 
speak, to every species, e.g., unusually fine specimens,{ dwarfed 
forms, reversed examples, scalariform individuals, and albinos, 
* A yet more depressed form from Twickenham is also in my possession. 
The dimensions are :—13, 20 X 17, 10 x 12, 4%, colouring normal. It is, of 
course, a distorted specimen. 
+ For a good summary of these see Mr. J. W. Taylor’s paper, Journ. 
Conchol. iii. pp. 246—51. 
t Generally called ‘‘ var. major”: fancy christening the late lamented 
Jumbo Elephas africanus var. major ! 
