142 JOURNAL OF CONCHOLOGY, VOL. II, NO. 5, JANUARY, I905. 



The views of Forbes, Wallace, and others, in so far as these authors 

 derive the moUuscan fauna of the British Isles from the continent, 

 when the latter was connected with our islands, have been adopted 

 by Mr. John W. Taylor,^ but in many other respects he abandons 

 the precepts of former writers and strikes out an entirely indepen- 

 dent line of thought. He looks upon the north central European 

 region as the birthplace of the chief types of life at present occupying 

 the terrestrial portion of the globe, where he maintains that the 

 highest forms of life are found. From this region the most adaptable 

 and dominating forms are supposed to emerge and to radiate outward. 

 Mr. Taylor divides the British Isles, from a moUuscan point of view, 

 into a western or Celtic and an eastern or Teutonic province (p. 402). 



Messrs. Kennard and Woodward^ express themselves very differ- 

 ently from Mr. Taylor. They urge that our non-marine moUusca have 

 reached this country from various sources. " A large number," they 

 say, " are boreal, some travelled hither along the now sunken land to 

 the north of Scotland, whilst others may have journeyed hither 

 through Siberia and the continent ; some have come from the south 

 by the old land connection between England and the continent ; 

 others, the so-called Lusitanian forms, have reached us from 

 south-west Europe ; a few species may be endemic" (p. 254). That 

 I am in perfect agreement with these views, rather than Mr. Taylor's, 

 may be gathered from a perusal of my work on the " European 

 Fauna." ^ I may acknowledge, however, that I fail to fully grasp Mr. 

 Taylor's reasoning on which he bases his arguments that our mol- 

 luscan fauna has originated in North Central Europe — the modern 

 Germany. He hints (p. 387) that during former arrangements of 

 land and water this active centre of evolution may have been else- 

 where, yet on his map he represents even the moUusca of Australia as 

 having travelled to their present abode over a formidable series of 

 land-bridges from Central Europe. 



The only safe criterion on which we can base our views as to the 

 place of origin of our species seems to me the consideration of their 

 past and present distribution. When we examine the present range 

 of our one hundred and twenty-seven species, we find among them 

 a number with a general distribution over the British Islands, such 

 as Helix nemoralis, Hyalinia cellaria, and Limncea ^eregra, and others 

 with a local distribution such as Geomalacus maculostis, Helix obvoluta, 

 and Dreissensia polymorpha. Lists of British Land and Freshwater 

 MoUusca, such as those which have been drawn up by Messrs. Taylor, 



1 Taylor, J. W., " A Monograph of the Land and Freshwater MoUusca of the British 

 Isles," vol. I, Leeds, 1894-1900. 



2 Kennard, A. S. and Woodward, B. B., "The Fost-Pliocene Non-Marine MoUusca 

 of the South of England," Proc. Geoloe:ists' Association, vol. 17, 1901. 



3 ScHARFF, R. F., " The History of the European Fauna," London, 1899. 



