137 

 NOTE ON THE BRITISH SPECIES OF AZECA. 



By henry a. PILSBRY. 



(Read before the Society, February 12th, 1908). 



An investigation of the nomenclature of the several forms of Azeca 

 shows that the name A. tridens (Pulteney) commonly used for the 

 British species is untenable. 



The species seems to have been noticed first by Pulteney, who, in 

 his "Catalogues of the Birds, Shells and some of the Rare Plants of 

 Dorsetshire," published in 1799, identified the British Azeca as Turbo 

 tridens of Gmelin {^Helix tridens Miiller, the well-known Chondrula 

 tridetts of Central Europe). He refers also to figures in Gualtieri 

 and Chemnitz which represent other species. Pulteney did not 

 describe his shell as a new species, his name being merely a wrong 

 identification of Gmelin's Turbo tridens; and this fact should, in my 

 opinion, bar the use of Turbo tridens Pult. {non Gmelin) for the 

 Azeca. There are a good many similiar cases in zoological literature, 

 where a really new species has been first described under an old name, 

 by an author who identified the novelty as a species already known ; 

 and so far as I can learn, such errors are not allowed to stand, even 

 when the two species in question are eventually placed in different 

 genera. From the standpoint of abstract justice it is clear that 

 Pulteney has no claim to the species, since he did not know that he 

 had found a new shell, and had no intention of giving a new name. 



Pulteney's description is so poor that the Azeca would hardly have 

 been recognized from his account. He states that it is " scarcely two 

 lines long" and has three teeth. I have never seen a specimen so 

 small as this, nor one with less than four teeth. Montagu criticises 

 Pulteney's description, but as his specimens were received from 

 Pulteney himself, we have no reason to doubt that the Dorsetshire 

 author really had Azeca. 



Various continental authors noticed the discrepancy between the 

 Turbo tridens of Pulteney as redescribed and figured by Montagu, 

 and T. tridens o{ 0\\\q\\x\. The first to discover this was Ferussac, 

 who in his well-known "Tableau Systematique" renamed Turbo 

 tridens Pult. and Montagu, calling it Helix goodalli^ and basing the 

 new name upon the descriptions of the English authors mentioned. 

 He gave neither description nor figure. Subsequently the English 

 snail was named Carychiicm polituvi Jeffreys (1829), Pupa brittanica 

 Kenyon (1829) and Azeca matoni Turton (1831). 



I Tabl. Syst. de la Famille des Lima^ons, iSai, p. 71. 



