JOURNAL OF CONCHOLOGY. 331 



ON THE NOMENCLATURE OF CERTAIN GENERA 

 OF BRITISH LAND & FRESHWATER SHELLS. 



By EDGAR A. SMITH, F.Z.S. 



Being his Valedictory Address as President of the Conchological Society 

 FOR the Year i8qo. 



The selection of a subject for the presidential address 

 was to me a matter of considerable anxiety ; however, 

 this being a society, a large proportion of whose members are 

 more or less exclusively students of British Conchology, it 

 occurred to me to offer some remarks in connection with that 

 particular branch of science, in the hope it might afford a 

 greater amount of interest than to refer, as is customary, to the 

 losses of the society during the past year, to give short biograph- 

 ical notices of deceased members, and to discuss the general 

 progress during the year of the branch of science to which the 

 society is devoted. The latter task in these days of ' Zoological 

 Records ' and similar publications is rendered less necessary 

 than in former times, and indeed the value of many works and 

 treatises can only be fairly judged and criticised by those who 

 are specialists in the various branches of malacology treated. 



The subject selected, upon which I beg to offer the following 

 observations, is the nomenclature of the land and freshwater 

 shells of the United Kingdom. 



It seems to me that British Conchologists, as a rule, are 

 apt to be too conservative in this respect. They do not advance 

 with Continental Malacologists ; not that I for a moment 

 advocate the extreme views propounded by the absurd 

 ' notivelle ecole ' in France. 



As an example of the conservatism I refer to, I would 

 instance the genus Fusus, which is still retained by English 

 Conchologists to include a number of shells, none of which in 

 reality have affinity with the typical forms of that genus. They 

 were located in it almost solely on conchological grounds, but 



