JUKES BROWNE : TAPES AUREUS AND ITS ALLIES. 281 



two forms, and I am inclined to regard it as having originated from 

 T. rhomboides rather than T. aureus. The probability of this will be 

 increased if it should prove that T. aureus is a comparatively recent 

 immigrant. 



Tapes texturaius and T. catenifer, on the other hand, appear to 

 have been developed in the Medtterranean, though it is not quite 

 certain whether T. catenifer did not also at one time exist on Atlantic 

 coasts. T. texturatus certainly does not seem to exist outside the 

 Mediterranean, but M. Dautzenberg has sent me a shell from St. 

 Lunaire, near St. Malo, which seems to form a link between T. catenifer 

 and T. aureus. It may be described as a thin-shelled and finely- 

 grooved form of the ovate variety of T. aureus. It has the inflated 

 form of aureus, and may be regarded as a variety evolved during the 

 differentiation of aureus and catenifer] and consequently as a link 

 between them. 



T. texturatus has been quoted from the Walton Crag, but with 

 much doubt. Only one specimen was known to Searles Wood and 

 figured by him in his "Crag Mollusca."^ He admits, however, that 

 the form of the shell is somewhat different and that the lunule is not 

 so distinctly marked, consequently he only " assigns it provisionally to 

 what appears its nearest representative." By the kindness of Mr. 

 F. W. Harmer, I have been allowed to examine a nearly perfect 

 specimen and several fragments which he obtained from the Walton 

 Crag at Oakley and believes to be the same shell. I have compared 

 them with many specimens of the recent species, and think they 

 come quite as near to T. catenifer as to T. texturatus. The perfect 

 fossil is regularly oval, much compressed, and very finely grooved, 

 with a longer and straighter dorsal margin than T. texturatus usually 

 has, and it is less produced in front. It might well receive a special 

 varietal name. 



T. texturatus has even been separately entered in a list of British 

 Pliocene fossils, as a living British shell, merely because Jeffreys and 

 others regarded it as a variety of T. aiireus, and thus the real geo- 

 graphical distribution of the species has been misrepresented because 

 the two have not always been recognised as distinct species. 



Hygromia rufescens (Penn.) m. sinistrorsum. — On May 27th last, at East 

 Iladdon, North Hants, some school children shewed me a congregation oi Hygromia 

 rufescois under some trampled nettles, one fell on my hand and I found it was a 

 nearly full-grown sinistral specimen. As this form is, I believe, new to Britain, if 

 indeed it is known at all, the find makes an interesting new record.— [Rev.] W. A. 

 Shaw, Haselbeech Rectory, North }r\a.n.\.?,{I\ead defoi-e the Society, June 2ist, 1905). 



I Vol. 2, p. 204, pi. 20, fig. 3, Pal. Soc, 1856. 



