Species q/" Teredo. 29 



appended to the example delineated) is not an imaginaiy one, 

 derived from the supposed specific name Batava (Dutch). 

 From a recent publication one learns that the European 

 species still devastates the dykes of Holland. 



The valves of the false batava are not so unlike those of 

 utriculus ; the pallets, however, differ from any I possess. 



T. affinis and T. hrevis^ from " Mus. Deshayes " (his 

 collection has been purchased intact by the French govern- 

 ment for, I think, the Ecole des Mines ; it is not in the 

 zoological gallery of the Jardin des Plantes) , should be rather 

 "copied from Deshayes's published figure;" probably 

 Deshayes did not possess the shell. It is a frequent error in 

 the ' Iconica ' to ascribe to authors the possession of species 

 which they have only borrowed. In some of the earlier 

 volumes indeed the metaphorically stereotyped ^' Mus. Cu- 

 ming " was attached to shells lent by myself*. 



T. palmulata. — Lamarck so inadequately described this 

 shell from its pallets alone that various members of the 

 section Xylotrya have been adjudged its representative. 

 Nevertheless the pictorial definition is fair enough. Adan- 

 son in 1759 (M^m. Acad. Paris, pi. ix.) figured three ship- 

 worms as the Taret de I'Europe, Taret de Senegal, and Taret 

 de Pondicherri (figs. 11, 12). From this last almost every 

 figure of T. palmulata has been more or less ill copied. I do 

 not find anything like it in the ' Iconica,' and certainly not 

 the one here figured, which is probably the one so named by 

 Thomson as an Irish species ; I also, in youthful confidence, 

 had accepted (Brit. Moll.) the same determination. Mr. 

 Jeffreys, who accepted as typical some pallets in the Parisian 

 Museum, from which he says " Lamarck described the 

 species," though that author neither referred (as usual) to the 

 museum nor to his own cabinet for the source of his descrip- 

 tion, asserts that they somewhat approximate but are distinct 

 from those of hipennatus^ and thus, indeed, they appear in the 

 original engraving, which displays more than a score of 

 articulations that taper from the first joint to the (brushy ?) 

 apex J the stalk only occupies one third of the entire length. 

 These specimens once belonged to Reaumur, and agree with 



* As the fate of typical or even figured examples is not unimportant, I 

 may state that verj' many of those rightly ascribed to " Mus. Metcalfe" 

 and " Mus. Reeve " have passed into the collection of the author, who 

 also purchased all the types described by Benson from Frederic Layard's 

 cabinet. 



